Eric Rofes is dead
Pioneering gay activist, academic and author Eric Rofes has died unexpectedly in Provincetown, Massechusetts where he was on holiday.
Over a 30-year period, Rofes had an indelible impact on queer thought, was a respected AIDS activist and an iconoclastic thinker whose loss will be significant.
I met Eric a number of times, mostly in connection with the International Gay Men’s Health Think Tank, which he, Brent and Will Nutland co-organised. Eric was a colossus of a man – physically as well as metaphorically, often exasperating, prickly and sometimes surprisingly vulnerable. His written work, especially Dry Bones Breathe, had a significant impact on me.
Here’s a photo of Eric, taken in Berkelouw’s Bookshop, Oxford St, Sydney, on 27 February 2002 on a field trip associated with the Sydney leg of the Think Tank. (We were in the bookshop to talk about gay spaces, particularly libraries and sex clubs – if you know the history of the building which houses Berkelouw’s you’ll probably be able to guess the connection.)
Eric’s death has come as a great shock to a number of our friends. As prickly and exasperating as he was, he will be missed.
Tree change
This is where I live now:
This is where I’m moving to in two weeks’ time:
(Both pictures – from Google Earth – are at the same scale.)
After years of talking about it, B and I are making the great leap to live in the bush. We have found a nice house on three-quarters of an acre, just outside Kyneton, about an hour north-west of Melbourne.
Brent will be closer to his workplace, I’ll be commuting to Melbourne three days a week. We have plans for a vegetable garden, and chickens. Satellite internet has been booked for installation, but no word yet on whether it will happen in a timely fashion. I expect we’ll have to contend with dial-up for a period.
‘This is so gay I’d rather be dead’
The inquest into the death of Pvt Jacob Kovco, the only Australian soldier killed on duty in Iraq, has been hearing some rather weird allegations.
First we heard that Kovco had had a dream in which he had a premonition of shooting himself in the head “to see what it would feel like”. Kovco wrote about the dream, which he had exactly one month before his death, in his diary.
Colonel Michael Griffin, said the details were “almost precisely the same” as known events of the private’s death. Family members sobbed as the diary entry was read.
A day later, more details of the accident have been revealed by “Soldier 17″, who was in the room with Kovco when he shot himself. Apparently the two were listening to a Cranberries song and singing along “in a female, homosexual way” when Kovco shot himself in the head.
Private Jake Kovco was skylarking with his two room-mates, singing along to the Cranberries song Dreams just moments before he died.
In a satellite link from Baghdad, the witness, known as Soldier 17, said his iPod was hooked up to speakers and as the three soldiers sang to the loud music, Private Kovco pulled his shorts up high in a joking way. Soldier 17 said: “We were just making fun of the song and singing in the best girl’s voice we could.”
His statement added: “…(singing) in a high voice - female homosexual way.”
Soldier 17 said, “If you’re asking me, ‘Did I see him going for his pistol?’ “No, I didn’t.” But he spoke of the numerous occasions he had seen Australian soldiers in Iraq pointing empty guns at each other and pulling the trigger for a joke.
He said: “The only way he may have (shot himself) was in a joking fashion because of the way we were singing, as if to say ‘this is so gay, I’d rather be dead’”.
We’ve come a long way from the official “died while cleaning his gun” excuse peddled by the military authorities at the time of Kovco’s death. It looks like we have some distance further to go before the truth comes out, if it ever will.
The incompetnce of the military in handling this tragedy has been astounding from the start. First they lied about the circumstances of his death, then they lost his body and flew a stranger’s corpse home with full military honours, then some clown left a disk containing the secret report into the accident in an airport computer terminal.
Meanwhile, the Defense Department of our ally across the Pacific has been criticised for listing homosexuality as a “mental disorder”.
The real mental disorder is the delusion that war is just, that young men’s lives are expendable and that Iraq is any better off today than it was under Saddam.
Our unlikely ally
Queensland National Party MP Warren Entsch is collecting names on a petition to support his private member’s bill to recognise same-sex relationships.
Entsch is an unlikely ally for the queer community – a straight-talking right-winger from the far north of Queensland – but his outspoken support for recognition of partnership rights has drawn the ire of the Family First Party (who preferenced the ALP ahead of Entsch at the last federal election). So he can’t be all bad.
The petition is only open to people registered to vote in Australia.
