Not sure if I’m there for the barebacking or the nail biting, but yours truly will be one of the panelists for this Midsumma Festival event next Sunday afternoon. Brent’s on the panel too. Promises to be excruciatingly entertaining. It’s free. Do come. Email Suzy to book your seat.
Sixty years having passed since the liberation of Auschwitz, there has been much discussion in the media recently about this terrible chapter in our history.
Of course it’s important that we take the opportunity, when these arbitrary anniversaries arrive, to remember. As George Santayana’s much-quoted epigram reminds us, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and this is one chapter of human history we should never forget, if only for that reason.
It’s important also, of course, to remember that the brutal efficiency of the Nazi execution industry was not only targeted at Jews, but also homosexuals, communists, Roma (“gypsies”), Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people and other classes of humanity deemed “undesirable” by the monstrous philosophy of Nazism.
My point here is not mere “me-too-ism”; I think it’s important to understand the holocaust was target first at the Jews, but not only at the Jews. The terrible lesson of the holocaust belongs to, and applies to, every human being.
The pink triangle symbol is our legacy of those dark times, a badge of oppression repurposed to symbolise our liberation, and that’s a project that is still far from complete. It’s worth noting that the handful of homosexual internees who survived the death camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere were not “liberated” when the Soviet and other allied troops arrived 60 years ago this week; instead these “hundert-funz-und-siebzigers” were returned to prison to “serve out their sentences” – homosexuality was, after all, a crime then in Britain, France and the Soviet Union as well as in Germany.
Today the pink triangle has been largely supplanted as a queer symbol by the rainbow flag, which I think is unfortunate. The pink triangle has meaning, significance and history, something which the rainbow lacks. The pink triangle, like us and like our history, has an identifiable dark side; the rainbow is merely a design.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has an excellent online exhibit dealing with the history of homosexual persecution under Nazism. Another place worth browsing is www.pink-triangle.org.
I’ve been asked to promote these two websites, a request I’m happy to oblige:
1. Hunter Guys is a new website for gay and bi guys in the Newcastle/Hunter Valley area. The idea is to create connections between guys in the area and is also part of a research project at La Trobe Uni called “Activating the Internet”. Could be a real boon for guys in my old stomping ground.
2. Private Lives is “the biggest and most ambitious research survey of the health and wellbeing of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people ever conducted in Australia. It is being carried out through Gay and Lesbian Health Victoria in partnership with the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS) at La Trobe University.
Disclosure: I work at (but not for) ARCSHS.
In honour of Australia Day, we chose an Australian classic – Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) – as this week’s movie in the 1001 movie project.
What the book says: “A ghost story without the ghosts, a puzzle without a solution, and a story of sexual repression without the sex.”
This is a movie what has long been embedded in the Australian psyche, a critically-acclaimed masterpiece which simultaneously launched the careers of Peter Weir and Russell Boyd, and brought about a renaissance in Australian movie-making. The story is simple: on St Valentine’s Day, 1900, a group of girls from an exclusive finishing school near Melbourne head out for a picnic. At the end of the day, three of the girls and a teacher have vanished without trace. The mystery of their disappearance is not solved when one of the girls is found, miraculously still alive, a week later, nor do we know much more at the end of the film. That lack of closure can make this a maddening film to watch if you’ve been raised on formulaic Hollywood movies, but it’s unquestionably a sign of the brilliance of Weir’s vision, and something he set out to achieve from the outset.
“We worked very hard,” Weir told an interviewer for Sight & Sound, “at creating an hallucinatory, mesmeric rhythm, so that you lost awareness of facts, you stopped adding things up, and got into this enclosed atmosphere. I did everything in my power to hypnotize the audience away from the possibility of solutions.” — from Roger Ebert’s review of the film.
The cinematography includes numerous long, languid shots of the landscape – the bush and the rock become central characters in themselves, ably supported by the wildlife and the incessant background drone of insects. The girls speak less and less as they climb the rock, remove their shoes and stockings, seemingly drawn into the rock’s embrace. It’s implicitly sexual, and complemented by the simmering sexual attraction between the girls (and, we thought, the two young men as well) and the haunting musical score (Romanian pan-pipe artist Zamfir’s finest hour, I dare say).
Like many Australians, I had thought the novel Picnic at Hanging Rock was based on a true story, something that author Joan Lindsay hinted at. While the story may be fictional, there is a great deal that is true about the underlying ideas – of strangers in a strange land, of the hypnotic power of the Australian bush, of the nature of sexuality and repression and spirit.
Favourite scene: This is not a movie to pull scenes out of at random. The whole movie is stunning.
Favourite quote: “What we see and what we seem are but a dream. A dream within a dream” (Miranda).
Verdict: There are some moments at which this film seems as naïve as its characters, but taken as a whole it is well deserving of its iconic status. Four stars, 998 movies to go.
Yesterday, January 26, was the national day of Uganda, India, and Australia.
Like all our national symbols, Australia Day bitterly divides this country, marking as it does the day on which the British first seized possession of this wide brown land from its original inhabitants in 1788, turning it into a dumping ground for thieves, dissidents, low-lifes and other undesirables – the Guantanamo Bay of its time. Commemorating as it does an act of colonisation rather than of real nationhood, it’s a troublesome anniversary for many. On the left it is widely referred to, perhaps unhelpfully, as “Invasion Day”, but even the aborigines have moved on from that position: “Survival Day” is the preferred moniker these days.
Back in 1788, Captain Philip read a proclamation, the British flag was hoisted, a toast was made to king George, and a volley of shots fired. Then the male convicts were unloaded and ordered, despite the fact that many of them could not walk after being on a ship for the previous eight months, to put up tents. The women were unloaded a few days later, an event that was followed by a violent storm and, in the ensuing confusion, Australia’s first orgy. I can’t help but wonder how many Australians are descended from the bastard children conceived that night.
My own antecedents arrived in the colony a few years later, he in 1803 (my great, great, great grandfather John Sherwood, convicted for sheep stealing; sentenced to hang but later commuted to life transportation) and she in 1807 (Ann Lane, convicted for stealing a child’s dress, sentence: seven years’ transportation).
These days, January 26 is mostly observed by the flag-waving, anthem-singing, Queen-toasting classes, who see it as symbolic of their continued dominion over property, nature and savagery, and the cranky left, who use it as an occasion to question historical orthodoxy and remind those who will listen that Australia’s story, then as now, is a troubled tale. Most people fall somewhere between these two extremes, appreciative of the day off work but not driven to any sort of patriotic fervour by the occasion.
Brent and I packed a picnic basket and took the dogs to Yarra Bend Park, where we lasted less than an hour in the stifling heat before coming home and cooling off as best we could.
Been looking at my server logs.
In the 24 days since the beginning of this year, buggery.org has had 22,549 unique visitors, registering 374,495 hits.
Of those visitors, 1479 were by various bots, crawlers and other non-human entities, so let’s disallow them. A total of 4232 hits were on the comment script, of which 99.9 percent were spammers, and about 99 percent of those spammers were stopped by MT-Blacklist. Let’s adjust the numbers to allow for that, too
That leaves 20,838 happy, shiny people, an average of 868 visitors a day, about a 50% increase in the last two months. If things keep going at this rate, I’ll have more readers than The Australian within two years. Bigger than Rupert Murdoch! 
But a lot less rich. Obviously, I make bugger-all out of this site, and I don’t expect that will change, but it’s currently costing me $39.95 a month for hosting, plus 5.5c for each megabyte over 20GB. For January, that’s looking like a total of close to a hundred bucks. The next plan up has unlimited data transfer, for sixty-some bucks a month, so I guess that’s where I’m headed. Still only about $2/day for all the joy and happiness and obsessiveness that this site gives me, so I can’t complain.
And no, I won’t be selling advertising space on this site. Advertising is a scourge, and you’d just Adblock it anyway.
Question: Who is missing from my blogroll? It’s been ages since I added anyone to the blogroll (it’s on the left of the screen, you have to click “jiggery” to display it) and I’m convinced I’m missing someone.
So this is an open invitation – suggestions in the comments please, and don’t be shy about nominating yourself. Just send me somewhere great.
Put the dogs in the ute this morning and headed off in search of adventure. Drove to Woodend, Trentham and Daylesford. A really lovely day and a very charming and interesting part of the world, but too tired now to say anything thoughtful. Photos on flickr.
Last night was the opening of Midsumma, Melbourne’s annual gay pride festival. So we trotted off to Federation Square to enjoy the festivities. A good time was had by all, and I have the sore head to prove it, so I won’t try to write anything.
Instead, there are numerous photos on my flickr page … but my special favourite is these girls:
The world needs more middle-aged lesbian tap dancers. You go, girls!
As we meet here today, we stand on the threshold of a new era of peace in the world.
The central question before us is: How shall we use that peace? Let us resolve that this era we are about to enter will not be what other postwar periods have so often been: a time of retreat and isolation that leads to stagnation at home and invites new danger abroad.
Let us resolve that this will be what it can become: a time of great responsibilities greatly borne, in which we renew the spirit and the promise of America as we enter our third century as a nation.
This past year saw far-reaching results from our new policies for peace. By continuing to revitalize our traditional friendships, and by our missions to Peking and to Moscow, we were able to establish the base for a new and more durable pattern of relationships among the nations of the world. Because of America’s bold initiatives, 1972 will be long remembered as the year of the greatest progress since the end of World War II toward a lasting peace in the world.
The peace we seek in the world is not the flimsy peace which is merely an interlude between wars, but a peace which can endure for generations to come.
It is important that we understand both the necessity and the limitations of America’s role in maintaining that peace.
Unless we in America work to preserve the peace, there will be no peace.
Unless we in America work to preserve freedom, there will be no freedom.
— Richard Milhous Nixon: Second Inaugural Address, 20 January 1973 [full text]
Well, the votes are in and buggery.org is not the top UK gay website. The system works.
Hearty and heartfelt congratulations to handsome, clever, lovely Tom Coates, who truly deserves the mantle of the UK’s alpha homoblogger, and to Gazza, who won the Australia/NZ category. It’s always nice when New Zealand wins a little something, don’t you think? Congratulations to all the other winners and nominees, too.
And the Miss Congeniality award? No contest.
I’m going to Scissor Sisters AND Cher.
Update, 27 January: … AND Bette!
Week two of our ambitious movie-watching project. We decided to stay in the same temporal space (1977) but a very different movie to last week.
What the book says: “A terrific sci-fi mystery in which an Everyman’s search for meaning climaxes thrillingly in first contact with extraterrestrials.â€
I remember seeing this movie at the cinema when it was first released. I went with my dad, at the King’s cinema in Carp Street, Bega. As far as I can recall, this was the only movie we ever went to see together, so it’s kind of a special memory. The special effects in this film are as dazzling today as they were when it was first released, and it’s impossible for me to watch this film without experiencing the same sense of wonder and delight that I did a quarter century ago. This movie made me wonder for the first time whether we were alone in the universe. (Living in a small town at the arse end of the planet, I hoped we weren’t. I still do.)
Watching the movie with a more mature and more critically-attuned eye, the classic Spielbergian elements are all there: the search for meaning in emptiness. The suspicious attitude toward the authorities. The fragile relationships between Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) and his wife, his sons and his mental health.
Favourite scene: Brent says “mashed potato†but I’m torn between the first encounter, with Neary in his truck, and the scene in which, having gone completely berko, he starts throwing potted plants and bricks into his kitchen window, and Mrs Neary takes the kids to her sister’s house for protection. The long shot at the end of that scene, with Roy in his pyjamas and dressing gown, the neighbours standing mute all around, as he climbs in through the kitchen window, is a classic.
Favourite quote: Claude Lacombe (played by the great François Truffaut, of whom we’ll be seeing a bit in the next few years) explains “Major Walsh, it is an event sociologique!â€
I liked this film the first time I saw it and I still like it today. My dad, for the record, hated it. He thought it was silly and too long. I realised I should have taken him to see Star Wars instead. Dad would have loved Star Wars, but I don’t think he ever saw it. He died in 1979. Three stars, 999 movies to go.
With Iron Mark sentenced to wander forever down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, the battle for the leadership of the Labor Party is hotting up. Although the Three-Time Loser remains the only person to have formally declared his candidacy, there’s much talk about Rudd, and, to a lesser extent, Gillard as potential challengers.
The blogosphere is all a-titter at the thought of a contest for The Ultimate Prize of Australian politics (OK, technically the Prime Ministership, not the leadership of the ALP, is The Ultimate Prize, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here). Nic White at The 52nd State has a useful round-up of who’s backing who among the cream of the Australian bloggerati.
I’m a bit saddened that no-one seems to be thinking very creatively about the possibilities: White’s tally board has Gillard on 6, Beazley 5, Rudd 3. The only person outside this triumvirate of true believers to get a guernsey is WA Senator Chris Evans (who?). It’s hardly a Melbourne Cup field, so I decided I’d cast my eye over a few of the ALP’s less likely leadership contenders. Continue reading
Been up since the crack of dawn this morning, so that we could take delivery of our new lawn. What was until this morning a few scraggly tussocks, assorted prickles and lots of dust is now a lush square of soft green buffalo:
Before I get harangued by my greenie readers, let me say that yes, I know that having a grassy lawn is about as environmentally appropriate as starting an open-cut uranium mine in your backyard. In my defence, I should point out that we don’t own this place, we rent it, so there’s only so much we can change, and there really was not much more than dirt out there before (so let’s call this an erosion-control system, not a lawn).
And, yes, that is a sprinkler in the middle of the lawn. Before you go reporting me to the authorities, let me assure you I have all the necessary permits, exemptions, and licences. (In this town, and indeed in most of this dry, dry country, water use is strictly controlled. The use of lawn sprinklers is practically a capital crime.)
Next door they don’t have a lawn, instead they have fence-to-fence concrete. As you can see, puppy-next-door is deeply envious of the lush expanse just out of his reach:
I suppose we’re going to need a lawnmower now. How very suburban.
The sun is shining, the twinks are rooting, Paul’s off his high horse and all’s right with the world.
Newspapers this morning are splashing with umpteen different angles on how the Three-Time Loser is going to liberate us from John Howard’s thousand year reich. I can’t even bear to look.
Last night we had a great dinner with our friends J & M – thanks again, guys. Drank lots of wine, talked about our respective memories of 1985, gossiped and kvetched and laughed before the conversation degenerated into a discourse on modern accounting practice. Never get me started on accounting standards after drinking a bottle of red. I’m hard to shut up.
Today being Wednesday, tonight is movie night, so we’ll be knocking off #2 in out 1001-movie cinematic odyssey. The options include Close Encounters, Citizen Kane and Chinatown (obviously I didn’t get past the ‘C’ rack in the movie store). Will decide later in the day which we’re going to see tonight.
Mark Latham has done the inevitable and quit politics for good.
I have to say the spectacle of watching the Labor Party (suggested campaign slogan: “We Eat Our Own”) standing around Mark Latham’s almost lifeless body, taking turns to kick their own, seriously ill, leader in the guts, has only reinforced what we all already knew.
I can’t say Latham proved to be anything more than a disappointment, but the ALP’s inability to see the forest for the factional trees is even more tragic than the leader’s ignominious departure from everything he ever wanted.
But of course their are leaders aplenty hovering nearby, waiting to strike. Lazarus himself has had his triple bypass and, with the corpse still warm, has read his pre-prepared speech claiming the leadership for himself. That speech has been burning a hole in Beazley’s top pocket for a while now. Another loser wanting to do his bit to lead the losers party to another glorious defeat.
John Howard must be pissing himself. Go the Greens.
Hello children, and welcome to the new, super-inoffensive, safe-for-work version of buggertterfly.org. In view of the recent scandal regarding the highly vulgar and salacious picture that used to be at the top of this page, for the next 24 hours I’ve decided to tone things down a bit.
Instead of my usual discussion of politics, culture, science and art, for the next 24 hours I will only be describing things I saw on television, with a highly engaging side discussion of my ongoing battle to get my Tivo to record the signal from my HD cable box, and whether or not I should switch cellphone companies.
That’s right, folks, in my never-ending quest to win more viewers of the ‘I’m-gay-but-I’ll-get-sacked-if-I-come-out-at-work’ variety, I’ll be talking about the same pointless crap that 99.9 percent of the rest of the planet is obsessed with. I can’t wait to get started, but first I have to go to the gym.
(P.S. Those two butterflies in the picture above? They’re fucking.)
My nomination for the “Best UK Weblog” category of the Queerday.com Queeries award (see this post) has caused something of a storm in a teacup in far-off Scotland, where my erroneous nomination has gravely distressed one of my co-nominees:
Queer Day removed a nominee from our first annual Queery Awards for Best UK Weblog. Ironically, we recently learned an Australian weblog, Buggery.org, somehow found itself in the UK competition. Perhaps nominating participants assumed buggery was a strictly British practice – we’re admittedly baffled. And while Buggery will remain listed under Best UK Weblog, another UK nominee asked to be withdrawn. “Would you please remove my site, Naked Blog, from your Best UK weblog poll. I don’t wish to occupy the same platform as an unpleasantly-named site featuring a gratuitously offensive picture. (The site in question isn’t even British, so far as I can tell.)” Voting in all categories continues through Sunday at midnight.
Let’s address the old queen’s concerns in turn. But first, there’s still a little time to vote for me. Go! Quick! Closes soon!
Has this been around for a while and I only just noticed it, or is it new? Either way, I’m happy. My city has arrived.
Buggery.org has been nominated for an award, but unfortunately it’s the wrong one.
Obviously, I’m thrilled to be up for a 2004 Queery award from the nice folks at Queerday, but “UK Weblog” I am not. Go there and vote for me anyway.
UPDATE, 16:00: Philo from Queerday emailed me back:
I know, we’re still completely baffled. Like why did people nominate you in the wrong category, how did you get through the judges process with nobody knowing or noticing that…
Yesterday we had this to say about that:
http://www.queerday.com/archives/007476.html
maybe tomorrow we’ll say differently.
Obviously, the judges are blind, or never got past the rutting boys at the top of the page… in any case, whatever. Being in the UK category is fine by me, even if it does put me up against some of the big names of homoblogging. All the more reason why you should vote for me.
The United States has finally admitted what the rest of the world has long known: there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq:
The Bush administration in the United States has confirmed it has given up its hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq.
The 700 members of the Iraq Survey Group have been redeployed.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan announced the hunt was over.
“The weapons that we all believe were there based on the intelligence were not there,” he said. (ABC)
I noticed McClellan says “believe” not “believed”. Defiant to the last? Doublespeak? Bushism?
The end of this fruitless search for non-existent weapons which were cynically used to justify an illegal war should give us all pause: what have we done?
Bush’s “War on Terror” changed the rules of war, eroded the idea of just an unjust conflict, and moved us a substantial distance closer to barbarism. I dread where it will end.
Okie-dokie. Yesterday I set myself the rather ambitious goal of watching every movie listed in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, one each week for twenty years, or until my eyeballs fall out. We have begun.
Deciding where to begin was an early obstacle. The movies are listed in the book chronologically, from Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902) to Kill Bill: Vol 1 (2003). Obviously I would have to chart a more oblique course which would provide me and my cotravellers with some variety. On a whim, I decided we should begin with 1977, the year of my own cinematic coming-of-age (Star Wars). We could have watched Star Wars (it seems appropriate that I see every film in the list, not just the ones I’ve not seen) but it’s only been a few weeks since I watched that film.
Having come home with an armful of newly-purchased DVDs yesterday, and having settled on 1977 as a starting point, we finally had to choose between Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Sean, our dinner guest, expressed a preference which settled the question, and I’m grateful to him for that.
This is a wonderful movie, funny and clever, with numerous postmodern flourishes which had the four of us tittering with delight. A semiautobiographical tale, apparently, with Allen playing his nervous New York character and Diane Keaton absolutely stunning and entrancing as the eponymous Annie Hall.
Favourite scene: early in the movie when Allen is getting fidgety and nervous while waiting in a movie queue (they’re off to see a Bergman film) in front of a couple who are loudly discussing the work of Fredrico Fellini and Marshall McLuhan. Alternating between kvetching to Keaton and speaking direct to camera, he eventually gets into an argument with the guy behind, who claims to be an expert on the subject (he teaches a course somewhere). Allen grabs the real Marshall McLuhan from behind a nearby signboard, who tells the man his theories are wrong. “If only life were more like this,” Allen says.
Favourite line: “Sex with you is a Kafkaesque experience.”
All in all, a brilliant movie and a great start to our project. Four stars, 1000 movies to go.
Brent and I went to see Finding Neverland last night on Lygon Street. We both had tears in our eyes at various points in the story about J.M. Barrie and Peter Pan and rediscovering your lost choildhood and the ticking clock in the croc inside all of us. I think Brent found the story especially moving.
Afterwards we had a nice dinner and a bottle of sauvignon blanc at the Universita Ristorante across the road and wandered into Readings “just for a browse” which ended up being a $120 book-buying spree. One of the books we came home with is 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, which I’ve had my eye on for a while but had not been drunk enough to buy before. Getting my head into it at home I can see my cinematic experience is sorely lacking — I’ve probably seen only 100 or 200 of the recommended flicks.
So here’s the plan. A thousand movies, at one movie a week, will take me about 20 years to get through. Working my way through the greatest movies of all time seems like an eminently commendable way to spend a couple of decades, so we have designated Wednesday as movie night. That’s tonight, so I’ll be hitting the DVD store at lunchtime today. Wish me luck.
A new year has begun; the future is a blank canvas. Exciting stuff. I’ve ignored buggery.org for the first elevn days of the new year — not really on purpose, I’ve just had other things occupying my consciousness, like work and the shitty weather and my plan for global domination in the coming year … the usual.
In an attempt to make life difficult for comment spammers, I managed to break the comment system a few days ago. It’s partially functional now; still slightly broken but you can post comments again. Sorry for the nuisance meanwhilst.
