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Both The Age and NineMSN are running reader polls on the gay marriage issue. Get out the vote:

• Should same-sex marriages be recognised throughout Australia? (The Age)
• Should gay couples be allowed to marry? (NineMSN)

If you’re still in the votin‘ mood after that, you could follow up with Is the government alienating workers with its new industrial relations laws? on Yahoo!7.

After all the news telling us our relationships aren’t worth a damn, is it any wonder we’re depressed?

(Screenshot from news.google.com.au.)

In an interview with The World Today, constitutional expert George Williams hits the nail on the head:

It all comes down to one word and that is marriage. There is no doubt, I think, that the States and Territories can legislate and Tasmania’s already done this as well, for a form of union between two people of the same sex that is not called marriage.

It’s an interesting argument. Williams says that, as long as they avoid the ‘M’ word, the states and territories can construct a wholly separate, parallel form of civil union which would confer similar or identical rights (under state law) to those conferred by ‘capital-M’ marriage.

Of course, that’s only half the argument – and indeed, it’s the lesser half. Most (all?) states and territories already recognise same-sex relationships to a greater or lesser degree. The most glaring discriminatory statutes which remain are all federal, and there’s no way, constitutionally or politically, the feds are going to make themselves subject to state laws.

Still, if the states do press on with civil unions, it creates a legal anomaly and inconsistency that, presumably, one day a more enlightened federal government would seek to correct.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the federal government has said their concern is that the ACT proposal would enable marriage celebrants – who are licensed by the federal Attorney-General’s Department – to perform civil unions. Jon Stanhope has said today that he will establish a separate licensing process for civil celebrants, although it’s not clear whether the same person will be able to fulfill both roles:

Mr Howard said marriage celebrants, who are licensed by the Commonwealth, would not be allowed to perform civil union ceremonies. [The Age]

So much of the public discourse on this issue strikes me as rich with double meaning and faint hate. It will in time be a striking historical record of the degree of doublethink and thinly-veiled distrust that has so far characterised much of the debate.

Take this excerpt, also from The Age:

Mr Howard said the proposal was “marriage by another name” and he would not allow it.

“We will always seek to remove areas of discrimination against homosexuals but there is a special place in Australian society for the institution of marriage as historically understood and we do not intend to allow that to be in any way undermined,” he said.

It’s an incredibly thin argument, isn’t it? Howard says he’s against discrimination (of course, his government’s record is another thing altogether), but he insists he’s trying to preserve “the institution of marriage” – not by preventing queers from entering relationships which, apart from their same-sex character, are identical to marriage on first principles, nor (at least in theory) from being treated equally before the law, but simply by refusing them access to the ‘M’ word, as if it carries some magical power.

If marriage is just a word, then why is it so important to ‘protect’ it?

And if Howard really thinks the word is so important, why doesn’t he take the lead and create a separate structure of civil unions for gay men and lesbians (and others who are disinclined towards marriage, as the ACT has proposed)? He can have his shibboleth if it makes him happy – I just want equal rights.

Quentin Crisp once famously observed, “a lifetime of listening to disco music is a high price to pay for one’s sexual preference.” If ever we needed proof of that, it has arrived.

Fresh off the Hollywood milk-it-for-all-its-worth crap production line, you can now buy a collection of “dance remixes” of Gustavo Santaolalla’s Brokeback Mountain theme tune. Truly some of the most god-awful music I’ve ever heard, and a travesty of the first order when one considers the raw material from which it was unwillingly wrought.

Dull, repetitive and clichéd dance beats laid bluntly over a few tortured morsels of Santaolalla’s beautiful, haunting music. Utterly without merit and irredeemably bad.

It just goes to show how cynical, out of touch and creatively destitute the Hollywood suits are that this was even contemplated, much less that it was carried to completion.

As someone says in a customer review on the iTunes music store,

I‘m gay, and this is by far the gayest thing I’ve ever seen. … Did they have to do a super-gay-techno version? Way to make a complete joke of the film.

If I ever find myself on a dance floor where this garbage is played, I will personally garrotte the DJ.

Apparently these diet pill adverts screened in North America around 1982, in happier, simpler times. Another, peanut butter flavoured, version after the jump.

(Via Acid Reflux)

(more…)

This morning’s Age is reporting that the federal Attorney-General, Phillip Ruddock, has warned Jon Stanhope that the federal government will overturn the planned civil union law in the ACT.

The move is reminiscent of the Government’s 1997 disallowance of a Northern Territory law legalising euthanasia.

Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock has written to ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope warning him against enacting the ACT Civil Unions Bill as it currently stands.

The bill aims to give same-sex couples equal legal rights with married couples. It expects the bill to be passed in May. But it has caused a furore in Federal Parliament.

In a letter to Mr Stanhope, Mr Ruddock said the Government considered same-sex relationships were matters for the states and territories.

But it opposed “any action which would reduce the status of marriage to that of other relationships, or which would create confusion over the distinction between marriage and same-sex relationships”.

Weirdly, Ruddock’s argument is to do with the use of marriage celebrants to officiate at civil unions, not the civil unions themselves:

The Commonwealth has no problem with state laws giving same sex couples the same legal rights as married couples. But it objects to the use of marriage celebrants — licensed under federal marriage laws — performing civil union ceremonies, which the ACT bill appears to allow for as well as all other provisions that equate civil unions with marriage.

A couple of observations about this (it’s 4 a.m., so excuse me if I’m stating the bleeding obvious in my efavirenz-affected state):

1. Is it just me or does the language in the quoted paragraphs smell just a little bit off? Things like “reduce the status of marriage to that of other relationships” and “confusion over the distinction between marriage and same-sex relationships” strike me as oddly paranoid and more than a little insulting. It seems clear the Ruddock objective is to maintain, at all costs, a hierarchical distinction, and the more he speaks on the subject, the clearer his position becomes. All relationships are equal, but some are more equal than others.

2. The Age describes the move as “reminiscent of the Government’s 1997 disallowance of a Northern Territory law legalising euthanasia.” If that’s the case, I hope Stanhope stands his ground. There was a level of debate and public engagement about euthanasia during the 1997 standoff between Canberra and Darwin which helped to bring that issue to public attention. If discrimination against queer relationships was also given that level of attention, that would most likely be a good thing. And unlike the euthanasia question, most people in Australia are in favour of equal treatment for queers.

So bring it on.

A note for overseas readers: The ACT (Australian Capital Territory), where Canberra is, is not a state but a territory, and while it has its own government its laws can be overridden by the federal parliament at will. In 1997, the federal government used these powers to overturn a law passed in the Northern Territory (where Darwin is) which legalised (briefly) euthanasia.

Same-sex couples in Canberra could be holding ceremonies to have their relationships formally recognised as early as the middle of the year, after the introduction into the ACT Legislative Assembly yesterday of the Civil Unions Bill 2006.

The ACT’s chief minister, Jon Stanhope, said in a press release:

“While the ACT is determined to do what it can to afford equal protection under the law to all people, regardless of their sex or sexual orientation, it must be recognised that without changes federally, this equal treatment will be enjoyed only in relation to Territory laws. My challenge to the Federal Government is to end its discriminatory treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex Australians and amend federal laws so that the relationships of same-sex couples are treated in the same way as relationships of opposite-sex couples.”

Speaking on AM this morning, Stanhope repeated his challenge to the feds to follow his lead:

If our politicians and leaders, not just federally, but around the States are not prepared to stand and say, ‘I stand here and mount this objective justification for discriminating against gay and lesbian people,’ then they really should remove that discrimination.

I cannot find an objective justification for why I, as Chief Minister and leader of the Government in the ACT, should allow to persist discrimination on the statute books against gay and lesbian people. In that sense, the discrimination should be removed.

This is emerging as a powerful example of how far the Liberal Party has gone from its roots. Despite the efforts of a small minority (Warren Entsch being the one who comes to mind), our government is occupied not by liberals but by conservatives.

You can tell the Commonwealth Games are over (at last). The papers are full of stories about crocodile-rustlers, cranky koalas and child-mauling roosters.

Dr Tom Cruise, MD, explains how he treated a stuntman, injured on the set of Days of Thunder, with high-potency vitamins:

it was clear to me that what this man was most in need of was a handful of high-potency vitamins, which I administered with all due haste.

Really? This is an effective treatment for numerous compound fractures?

Well, not on its own, obviously. I had him carried to my trailer and placed in my sauna, where he could sweat out the pain-toxins that were coursing through his bloodstream.

Pain-toxins?

And I’ll tell you, he had a lot of them. I insisted that he not be allowed to leave, or he would’ve never gotten them all out. I was holed up with this sweaty, moaning stuntman in my trailer for somewhere over a week, giving him enemas several times a day, before I let the crew in to see how well he had recovered. It was really amazing.

From Tom Cruise’s Medical Forum.

Ethel Yarwood made this.

“Melbourne is the proud capital of street painting with stencils,” writes Banksy in the Guardian.

Its large, colonial-era walls and labyrinth of back alleys drip with graffiti that is more diverse and original than any other city in the world. Well, that was until a few weeks ago, when preparations for the Commonwealth games brought a tidal wave of grey paint, obliterating years of unique and vibrant culture overnight.

As the legendary stencil artist goes on to explain, Melbourne’s status as Australia’s street-art capital is not something the authorities are particularly proud of. “Graffiti’s not art; it’s vandalism,” says our Police Minister, whose youth (he’s 32) has obviously not given him an open mind. Earlier this year, there was an outcry over a photographic exhibition showcasing some of the best of the city’s work, organised to launch a fantastic book on the subject.

(The Victoria Police, we’re told, sent some officers to the exhibition on an intelligence-gathering exercise. Such are the police priorities in Australia’s organised crime capital.)

In the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games, the $1.1 billion white elephant event which is currently running in this city, much of that street art has now been obliterated, with a special “rapid response clean-up crew” working overtime to cover it with bland grey paint in a $1 million program to render Melbourne as sterile and generic as possible.

In place of a vibrant collage of often brilliantly executed, thought-provoking artwork, inner Melbourne now feels as dull as Geneva or Helsinki. Millions of yards of blue fabric hang from flagpoles and shroud construction sites, painting the city in a monochromatic, corporate palette. In a few days’ time, the Commonwealth Games will be forgotten forever (except by those of us left to foot the bill, perhaps) and the blue bunting will be consigned to landfill. But the grey paint will remain.

There’s something deeply fascistic about this, no? It says the authorities don’t trust the people to write on the walls, and so must suppress them. In an enlightened society, the right to write on the walls would be protected by law.

• Some photos of street art, in Melbourne and elsewhere, can be seen in this photoset on my flickr page

(Image above: “Don’t be scared, it’s only street art”, by “Dlux”, scanned from the book mentioned in this post.)

This 1973 animated sex ed film was produced by the Disney Studio – directed by Les Clark, who worked on everything from Steamboat Willie to 101 Dalmatians. It’s a little long (16 minutes) but an interesting artifact of those simpler days when there were only two sexually-transmissible infections…

(via BoingBoing)

We are at a turning point in the future of a fundamental and cherished Australian institution, the ABC. Right now, the Cabinet’s budget committee is deciding the ABC’s funding for the next three years. Their next meeting is on Tuesday.

As it stands, the ABC is $264 million poorer in real terms today than it was 20 years ago. The programs we rely on - from independent news and current and affairs to quality children’s content - are under extreme pressure. In a very real sense, the integrity of the ABC is now at stake.

Sign the petition at GetUp.org.au.

Or maybe he does.

(Postscript: yes, that’s two snappy headlines in a row that read x ≠ y. Maybe I’m losing my touch.)

“President George W Bush has offered US [financial] help for cyclone-devastated far north Queensland,” reports the AAP. Howard has turned the offer down, telling the meeja that “of course we are able, ourselves, to look after this.” I don’t suppose he pointed out to the leader of the world’s greatest democracy that he hasn’t finished cleaning up his own back yard yet.

• Australia is among the Western powers to have financially backed terrorist regimes, and its tough new sedition laws lean towards autocracy, former Federal Court judge Marcus Einfeld said last night.
• One third of Australians are completely ignorant of the Islamic faith, with women and people without tertiary training the most likely to lack knowledge, a new study shows.
• Ryan Pini made swimming history for Papua New Guinea by winning gold in the Commonwealth Games men’s 100 metres butterfly on Monday.
• THE Vatican has moved to rehabilitate the Crusaders by sponsoring a conference that portrays the Crusades as wars fought with the “noble aim” of regaining the Holy Land for Christianity.
• George Monbiot thinks he has discovered the clinching argument for closing the House of Lords. It is the presence in that chamber of a peer called Lady Tonge of Kew.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, in The Guardian:

I think creationism is … a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories … if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there’s just been a jarring of categories … My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it.

Yesterday’s state elections in South Australia and Tasmania have got under my skin. As expected, the Labor governments in both states have been returned, which is probably not a bad thing, but I’m worried by the degree of influence exerted by religious groups over the results.

In South Australia, the ALP appears to have picked up seven seats from the Liberals, and one from Kris Hanna, a former ALP member who quit the party in 1997, joined the Greens and then quit the Greens in February to contest the election as an independent. The Liberals have picked up one seat from an independent, but Labor look pretty comfortable in the House of Assembly.

It’s in the upper house that things get interesting. (more…)

UNICEF billboard on Oxford Street, Wednesday night.

Sydney trip was good, productive and enjoyable, but exhausting. By the time we got back from the airport on Thursday afternoon, both Brent and I were so bushed we fell into bed and slept.

The hypothetical was fun, as always with these things it’s hard to know how successful it was but the crowd seemed to appreciate it. Interestingly, there was a lot of discussion about sexual transmission of hep C and HIV superinfection, two subjects close to my heart.

Oxford street is covered with begging billboards asking for donations to UNICEF. Nothing wrong with that except for the use of the “V” word, which always makes my skin crawl. You’d think they’d know by now.

Tonight at the Australian Museum in Sydney, yours truly, his husband, and a panel of experts, discussing sex, HIV, love, pleasure and “other catastrophes”. Should be fun, more relevant and way lower budget than the other major spectacle taking place at the same time.

Come say hi.

Spent the day in lovely Daylesford for the annual Chillout festival – Australia’s best day out for poofs, dykes and their friends. We had hoped to be there for the street parade, but time and motion were against us this year, so we had to settle for just the carnival. Selected photos of us, the dogs, the drags and the occasional anonymous spunky lad in this Flickr set.

Just a quick update and plug for qWords, a buggery.org offshoot focusing on queer language. I’ve just finished the letter ‘C’ and we now have about 500 of the 2000 or so words on my list done. It’s a slow process but hopefully a worthwhile one. qWords is intended as a collaborative project, so if you’re interested in queer culture and language, check it out.

Ang Lee “is the pride of Chinese people all over the world, and … the glory of Chinese cinematic talent,” says the English-language China Daily. Conveniently, the story ignores the fact that the Brokeback Mountain director is Taiwanese, not mainland Chinese, and that the film for which he attracted this honour is banned in China. Apparently the state-run media in China also censored parts of Lee’s Best Director acceptance speech to remove any reference to the subject matter of the film.

It’s not just China which has shunned the film, of course. It’s been banned across the Middle East, and in a bunch of other not-so-enlightened countries. My friend Sam, a young gay guy who lives in the United Arab Emirates, says he’ll have to download the film illegally in order to see it – an argument in favour of file sharing if ever I heard one.

Meanwhile, in High River, Alberta (not a million miles from the Brokeback Mountain location shoot), Brent’s Aunt Shirley reports that local conservatives did all they could to convince the local cinema not to show the film, even threatening to picket the building. The cinema owner told the God-botherers to rack off, the threats of picket lines never came to anything, and Aunty Shirley loved the film.

Still in High River, “real-life gay cowboy” Grant McKinney told the Canadian Press that the film won’t change people’s attitudes. I stumbled across this story and wouldn’t have posted it except it includes some comments from Robin Burwash, who we’re told is not gay but “was a four-time Canadian bareback champion.”

Getting back to the point of this rather meandering post, I was as disappointed as anyone when I heard on Monday that BBM had been overlooked for the Best Picture gong. Disappointed, but hardly surprised, and I got over it fairly quickly. After all, there’s lots of precedent for the best picture missing out on “Best Picture”, and for all I know Crash (which hasn’t been released in Australia) deserved it. Brokeback has had its effect, though – The Washington Post is reporting that other “gay themed” films might be heading our way as a result of its success. Which may or may not be a good thing. Apparently The Front Runner and The Mayor of Castro Street are possibilities, but “Universal Pictures’ Adam Sandler-Kevin James comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, about a pair of straight firefighters who pose as domestic partners to get health benefits,” is “set for production in August.”

Please God no. Make it stop.

According to UK gossip site PopBitch:

Best float in this year’s Sydney Mardi Gras: Kate Moss Line Dancers. 30 guys dressed head-to-toe in Burberry, with blonde wigs, each carrying a 6ft cocaine straw to hoovering [sic] up the white lane in the street.

And from the SMH:

KATE Moss dancers snorting “cocaine” were there, along with a spoof of movie Brokeback Mountain and “friends” of the apparently gay-friendly Dick Cheney.

A few years ago I had one of those “100 things” pages on this site which included the observation that I had never done drag. Well I can cross that one off now. We had riotous fun moving up Oxford Street in our very bad drag outfits, sometimes line-dancing (badly, especially in my case) but mostly making fools of ourselves.

Having been to about a million Mardis Gras over the years, it’s easy to forget how much fun it is, even when one finds oneself on one’s hands and knees in the middle of Oxford Street with one’s nose, quite literally, on the asphalt, before hundreds of thousands of onlookers.

More photos below the fold, and more still (in a few days, probably) at www.yarwood.com.au. Thanks to Jorge Henao for the photos, to Kabi for his creative genius, organisational effort and the invitations, and to my 26 fellow Kates.
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So a diplomatic cable has been found which directly links the PM’s office to the AWB scandal. Turns out, despite the PM’s insistence that he never knew anything about the AWB paying bribes to Saddam Hussein until last year, a cable was sent to his office six years ago warning about the kickback allegations.

Howard says he receives “hundreds, indeed thousands, of cables a week,” and insists there’s no evidence the cable was ever “brought to his attention.”

Firstly, this argument seems either incredibly thin or it indicates a severe disfunction in the office of our Prime Minister. A cable comes addressed to the PM saying that an Australian company is contravening the UN Food-for-Oil program, channelling Australian money to Saddam Hussein in contravention of international sanctions, and it isn’t “brought to his attention”? That’s an absurd proposition. The only reasonable explanation is that Howard is lying, he’s been lying all along, he was aware of this when he committed Australian troops to the invasion of Iraq, and, along with some of his most senior ministers, he’s guilty of a massive cover-up spanning more than half of his much-lauded ten years in office.

It remains to be seen whether anything will come of this. Howard seems determined to shrug it off, but with more than two dozen documented examples where the government was alerted to the kickbacks, they’re being left with only two possible explanations why no action was taken: either they’re malicious or incompentent.

Philip Ruddock, an “avid stamp collector” who also occupies the office of Attorney-General of Australia, has described Melbourne as a city of couch potatoes.

“I have always recognised that Sydney is the city of participants and Melbourne is the city of enthusiastic spectators of great sports,” he said.

Coming from someone who we could politely describe as having a less than vivacious appearance (indeed, his nickname is “the Cadaver” and he bears more than a passing resemblance to C. Montgomery Burns) this is a bit rich.

According to the Herald Sun, the remark, made in Parliament, “caused Prime Minister John Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello to blanch visibly,” however Ruddock later backpedalled, insisting he was “truly excited about the Commonwealth Games being staged in one of the great sporting cities of the world.”

Asked about his own sporting activities, Sydneysider Ruddock said he goes for a walk every morning at 6am. Unfortunately, he didn’t say where he takes his daily constitutional, otherwise we could turn up and cheer him on.

I was surprised to read that Tim from Road to Surfdom posted a note of congraulations this morning on the Howard government’s ten years in power. I was initially surprised at this – Tim and I usually have similar opinions about things political and (as he notes in his post) he’s “not a big fan” of Howard.

But Tim’s a magnanimous fellow and, in the spirit of the occasion, I’ve decided to join him in extending my heartiest congratulations to John Howard on ten glorious years. Congratulations for the ‘never, ever’ GST, for individual contracts, for the children overboard affair, for Hollingworth, for the Pacific Solution, for the Manus Island, Christmas Island and Nauru immigration dumps, for “core” and “non-core” election promises, for work-for-the-dole, for the quickly-abandoned Code of Ministerial Conduct, for nobbling the republic referendum, for refusing to say sorry, for the ‘ten-point plan’ to extinguish native title after the Wik decision, for the women and kids in detention, for ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’, for the ‘Kirribilli agreement’, for being the Deputy Sheriff of the Pacific, for signing us up for the War on Terror, for invading Iraq, for Australians in Guantanamo Bay, for the sedition laws, for winding back the DSP, for blocking same-sex marriage, for health privatisation by stealth, for selling Telstra, for screwing the universities into the ground, for Wheatergate, for the Industrial Relations wind-back, for the fridge magnet and for ten years of lies, scandal, small-mindedness and shame.

Credit where it’s due.

Saturday, 2 March 1996 was the day of Sydney’s annual Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras. It was also the day of a federal election, so in between the last-minute sewing of sequins, polishing of leather, calling of friends to arrange to “meet under the mirror ball at midnight”, fussing, preening, waxing, styling and rolling fashion crises, we queers also had to squeeze in time to perform our democratic duty.

Somehow, I also managed to find time to spend four hours of that day standing in front of the Uniting Church hall in King Street, Newtown, handing out how-to-vote leaflets for The Greens.

At the party later that night and into the next morning, we all tried to pretend that nothing in particular had happened; we smiled and danced and embraced and flirted, but beneath the frivolity a secret division emerged: you were either one of those who knew or those who didn’t want to know. (more…)

I’ve spent the last couple of days pulling a new website into some kind of shape. qWords.org is live now and open for inspection. It’s taking quite a while to get the data from the old buggery.org names lists up to the new wiki-based site, but I’ve completed the letters A and B (or as I’ve come to know them, arse and bum).

Please take a look, tell your friends, and if you’d like to help what I now hope will be a collaborative project, let me know.

(Apologies if the site is broken in Internet Exploiter; I haven’t had a chance to check.)