buggery.org

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]