buggery.org

(Recycled from the House of Love)

One of the really sublime pleasures of living in Sydney is the quality of the coffee. The espresso in this town kicks arse, and has done so for at least a half century, ever since a big wave of Italian migration washed over our whiter-than-white country back in the 1950s. With the single exception of Melbourne, where espresso would be a religion if it weren’t for football, I’d stack Sydney’s coffeehouses up against any city on the planet — as long as you don’t stray too far into the suburbs, it’s genuinely difficult to find a bad espresso.

In Sydney, even McDonald’s sells espresso. The local coffee palate is just too sophisticated for filter coffee. (more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

I will not pretend to be anything more than buggered this morning. Without giving too much away, I shall simply say it was a "full" weekend. "Full" in the good sense, you understand, and now I’m paying for it. But I’m so utterly slack in posting even when I’m bright and bushy-tailed, I’ll try to amuse you with a bit of banter nonetheless.

I wish I had more time. Man, the things I would get done! And, while were at the wishing tree, I wish I had fewer distractions. Distractions of the work/study/obligation kind. I’d play so hard my head might explode. Actually, it probably wouldn’t be my head but some other part of my body (like my obscenely overtaxed liver) that would cark it, but you get the point.

Still, I have plans. The House of Love needs a makeover, and I’m in the mood for change. Just as soon as I deal with all these distractions I will begin. I have many ideas. I lust for a spare, lean, easy-on-the-eyes look. I will give up on making my site disability-friendly, in favour of making it fucking gorgeous to look at. I will delete old content. We may return to frames (sorry about that). The background may no longer be no-longer-sleek black but something a bit easier to work with (like, um, white?) Watch and see…

And I have a new computer to do this on. It took several hours after setting up my new [warning! brag alert!] 128MB Athlon 700 to discover the reason why I couldn’t find the cap to the kerosene tank — it doesn’t run on kerosene! Man, things sure have changed since I bought my last computer. Anyone out there need 400 litres of kerosene?

Other changes are in the wind, too. We may soon have a new family member at the House of Love, and my tulips are coming up — Spring will come.

(Recycled from the House of Love)

Saturday, 3 June, 12:59PM, 2SER-FM Studio 1: Thump, thump, thump …

My heart is beating so fast in my chest I’m certain it will drown out anything I have to say. I’m watching the computer screen on the opposite side of the desk count down the last seconds of the promo that precedes the opening of the show.

Thump, thump, thump. (more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

Today, as I write, high atop Mount Olympus, in the ruins of the Temple of Hera, the high priestess of the goddess Demeter and her acolytes are preparing to perform an ancient and solemn ceremony, igniting the sacred flame from the rays of the sun, commencing its epic journey through Greece and across the world to Sydney, Australia, forever to be remembered as the host city of the 2000 Olympic Games. (more…)

To:        BobbyO@heaven.org
From:      cybr@houseof1ove.com.au
Date:      9 May 2000
CC:        BobbyO@purgatory.org; BobbyO@hell.org
Subject:   And another thing...

Dear Robert,

I hear you’re dead — they say your car ran off the road somewhere between Sydney and Melbourne on Wednesday afternoon and, this time, you’ve gone for good — so I don’t know if this will reach you.  I don’t expect a reply (you never replied to any of my emails anyway) but I wanted to take a moment to remember who you were and have the final word in this battle of wits we’ve been waging for the last five-and-a-half years. (more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

I awoke yesterday morning to find this letter from Brent sitting on my keyboard. He asked that I post it here. (more…)

(Originally published in the Sydney Star Observer)

Sexual health, mental health and drug and alcohol issues are the key health concerns which a broad-based ACON should address, according to health professionals working in the gay and lesbian communities. Rather than diluting ACONÂ’s primary focus, they say, ACON will be able to deliver better HIV/AIDS services by taking a more holistic approach. (more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

Brent and I have been weighing up a thorny question: when is our anniversary? Seems like a simple enough thing to figure out, but it’s more complicated than it first seems. Unlike members of the straight hegemony, we are not allowed to marry (not that we would anyway) so we don’t have a convenient pre-ordained formal date from which to calculate, and thus there are several alternative anniversaries, each with its own attractions. Here they are, in chronological order: (more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

I know all my readers are committed culture-jammers, politically aware and active, so no doubt you’ve all been participating in TV Turnoff Week. Here’s a sample of what we’ve been missing. (more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

There’s something not quite right about leather and sunshine. They don’t really agree with one another, you know what I mean? What is, in the dark of a bar or club, a sexy and powerful statement becomes, in the full glare of daylight, just … drag.

Paul & Brent at Forbes St Fair. (Pic: Jamie Taylor)

Fortunately, those of us not living the full 24/7 leather lifestyle don’t often have to worry. There’s just one day a year in this town when the leather “tribes” venture out into the full glare of daylight, and that’s the Forbes Street Fair. It’s a mercifully brief interruption to an otherwise entirely nocturnal existence for the S&M community. (more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

God, that was rough.

I’ve been sick — sick as a dog — for the last ten days, and I hated every minute of it. You’d think after fifteen years of wrestling with Iris the Virus and the assorted opportunistic infections that she has brought into my life it’d take more than a bit of a bad cold to bring me down, but no.

I have been lying in a cold sweat, with a fever of 41ºC, deliriously contemplating my own mortality in the not-nice way and not coping with it at all well. I am not what you would call an "easy patient". Sick, I am a miserable, cantankerous, self-absorbed, attention-demanding, whining bastard. How I’ll ever manage when something really nasty strikes me down I do not know. The worst part of it is that, now that Hep Cindy has taken up residence in my liver, I can hardly even swallow an aspirin without having to contemplate the potentially dire consequences it will have on my liver and my long-term survival (or, as the medical researchers so prosaically put it, quot;clinical endpoint".)

Anyhow, I survived, and indeed I have a greater and stronger sense that I am up to the challenge of dealing with the "lifestyle adjustments" that hep C requires. It’s just about the end of March and I can tell you exactly how much alcohol I’ve had this month. A thimbleful of champagne before the Mardi Gras parade, one gin-and-tonic, and two glasses of claret. This from a man who used to have three or four drinks a day until quite recently, and to be quite honest I don’t miss it much. And drugs — yes, well, yes, it was Mardi Gras you know. That is behind us now, at least until Inquisition, a month from now.

So, I can’t drink and I can’t take drugs, that leaves gardening. Brent and I had a busy weekend in the garden, ripping out a lot of last season’s growth and cleaning up for winter, and putting in some winter colour. New Guinea Impatiens, Ixora, Viola, Primula, Flannel flower … should give us a bit of brightness through the gloom. We also put down an artichoke — not sure if that will succeed in a tub but if it does I will be mighty pleased, ‘cos we’re nuts for artichokes in this house — and a valerian, which meets my insatiable urge to grow medicinal herbs I neither need nor have the foggiest idea how to use. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

All of this is, I realise, a bit vague and rambling and less than my usual glamorous self but there is a point. I don’t want to start dispensing homespun wisdom of the type you can stich on a sampler, but there are simple pleasures. I’ve lived the high life and swung from a few chandeliers (well, not chandeliers exactly, but I’ve swung, believe me) and I will continue to do so as long as my weary frame will allow. But that does not mean that these simple joys — an afternoon spent in the garden with the man I love, a home-cooked meal, just one glass of really good claret, the parrots in the treetops, a moment of absolute silence — don’t have every bit as much value and aren’t just as great a thrill, in their way.

(Recycled from the House of Love)

England, late 1790s. John Sherwood, and two other unemployed, impoverished men, are caught stealing a sheep to feed their families. They are all found guilty and sentenced to hang. Sherwood’s sentence is later commuted to life transportation to New South Wales; the other two go to the gallows. A few years later, Anne Lane, a young woman, is convicted of the theft of a gown and two children’s frocks. Her sentence: seven years’ transportation.

In Sydney in the early years of the 19th century, Anne serves out her sentence while John eventually receives a conditional pardon. They take up residence (there’s no record they ever married, but that was a luxury of the rich in those days) and live out their days together. Those two ‘hardened criminals’ are my great great great grandparents.

There’s no way of knowing, so far in the future, whether these two were guilty of these offences, but obviously the severity of the sentences was extreme to say the least. But, you know, that was how things were in those far-off, less enlightened days…

Fast-forward a couple of hundred years. Here are some recent sentences handed down against aboriginal teenagers in Australia’s Northern Territory, under the NT’s mandatory sentencing laws:

• Receiving one bottle of stolen spring water, value $1.00: 28 days imprisonment.
• Unlawfully entering a takeaway shop and stealing food and beverages to the value of $18.50: 14 days.
• Stealing four slices of bread and cordial to the value of $2.50: 14 days.

So many years, so few lessons learned. Multinational corporations can destroy the environment, avoid tax and treat their workers barely better than slaves in the quest for profit, and our governments are falling over themselves figuring out ways of locking people up for being poor, black, ignorant, marginalised, hungry or just plain bored. The federal government’s response: to suppress the UN report which points out that laws such as these violate human rights and our international obligations.

China is fast emerging as a greater respecter of human rights than Australia. It is a crime to be poor. The prison industry is expanding at a rate that would make most technology start-ups green with envy, just as the welfare state is being dismantled before our very eyes.

The fascists who are increasingly in control of this country (special mention must be made of the odious Richard Court, Premier of Western Australia, who is musing out loud on the possibility of re-introducing the death penalty, although he hasn’t said so far whether it will apply to sheep rustlers) are no better than the fascists who went before them: the landowners of 18th century England who sent my ancestors to Australia, the slave traders, opium barons, textile merchants, all these capitalists who’d treat their animals with more respect than their fellow humans. It always comes down to profit. If there’s a buck to be made, screw human dignity, civil rights, justice, decency. Property must be protected at all costs.

Welcome to the panopticon. Have a nice day.

(Recycled from the House of Love)

December 23, 1970. A little boy sits on his father’s knee. He’s just six years old — old enough to carry a gun in Michigan, but still a child here in the Australia of the early 70s. His father, a stern man, red-faced, white-haired, with eyebrows that seemed to be constructed of steel wool, looks down on his offspring. For a moment nothing is said, while he gathers the courage to tell his son his decision.

Then, he speaks.

"Christmas," he says to the youngster, "is cancelled." The little boy is frozen with horror. Everything that makes his life worthwhile has been snatched away from him in an instant, his entire world is in uproar. The idea that December 25 could come and go without presents, fun, games, and too much food is beyond comprehension.

"All of your brothers and sisters, all your friends at school, everyone up and down our street will be having Christmas but you can stay in your room."

(more…)

(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)

I’ve been thinking about dying. Probably not so unusual for someone in my position, but as my health has improved over the last couple of years or so I’ve developed a sense of immortality that, like all notions of immortality, is somewhat over-optimistic. (more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

Valentine’s Day? Is that the one with the trick-or-treat thing? I can’t keep up with all these American “traditions” we’re getting more and more sucked into every year.

Especially not on the Monday after the first weekend of a Sydney tradition — Mardi Gras — which I survived more or less intact. I won’t pretend to be particularly coherent this morning, so I’ll keep it fairly brief.

Slick. The launch was slick. I’ve been using the word all weekend and it fits. Surprisingly, for a Mardi Gras event, there seemed to be no obvious technical dramas or fuck-ups. The speeches were no longer than they needed to be — but of course David “the Silver Fox” McLachlan could give an eight hour lecture on steamshovels and 20000 queers would still sit in rapt attention. New Zealand’s (and the world’s) first transsexual MP, Georgina Beyer, spoke engagingly and campily. We liked the fact that she was no world-shattering orator, just a trannie from a small, conservative town on the South Island who has something to say. (more…)

(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. (more…)

(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? (more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

Happy new year!

Today is the beginning of the Chinese new year festival, and the start of the year of the dragon: my year. And about time too.

… Dragons are born monarchs. As far as they can see, their power is indisputable. Dragons are idealists, perfectionists, they are born thinking they are perfect and they are inflexible…

I was born in 1964, the year of the Dragon, which means I’ll be thirty-six this year. Three dozen. Old enough to be out on my own. Actually, it’s getting to sound a bit close to forty. Best I make the most of it while I can.

… due to their hunger for power, Dragons are not well suited to growing old. The prospect of losing power, the helpless feeling of youthful strength ebbing away is unbearable to them…

Actually I’ve been saying for a while now that being on the wrong side of thirty-five means you have to work for everything you get. It’s all still achievable, just not as easy as it used to be. (more…)

We started our second course in Auslan the other night. Since Brent and I started learning Auslan – that’s AUstralian Sign LANguage – last year, lots of people have asked why a “hearing person” would want to learn to sign.

Well, for a start I’m not exactly a “hearing person” – I’m completely deaf in my right ear, and have been since before I was born. Actually I hesitate to say “I’m deaf” because it implies, as well as the physical disability, membership of the deaf community; I should say “hearing impaired”. More on that later. (more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

(There’d been a news item the night before about a T-Rex skeleton for sale on ebay)

I’m in a forest clearing with Annie McW., who is telling me that she has discovered that the rich volcanic soil in this area makes a delicious and nourishing drink when mixed with water. I’m not sure what to make of this idea but she mixes some dirt and water together in a glass and gives it to me to try.

It’s a bit gritty and murky but it does taste good. Annie explains that she’s planning to market the stuff and she wants me to come up with a marketing campaign. I’m not sure how to go about marketing dirt-mixed-with-water to a sophisticated global beverage market, so I decide to study Coca-Cola’s marketing strategies to find the answer.

Meanwhile, Annie’s son Johti, who I learn has been appointed head of excavations for this new venture, arrives with disturbing news: while digging up the raw material for our assault on the beverage industry, he has unearthed a complete tyrannosaurus rex skeleton right in the middle of the part of the forest where the best drinking dirt is located. We head off to investigate.

Sure enough, it’s a T-Rex, the giant, majestic creature perfectly preserved in the loose soil. We hold an emergency meeting of the Dirt Marketing Corporation (Annie, Jo and I) on T-Rex’s tail to discuss the implications of the find.

It’s clear we have to keep this quiet: if word gets out we’ll be inundated with archaeologists and palaeontologists and every other kind of do-gooder-ologists and our plans to dominate the black gritty beverage market will be ruined.

Jo, who in spite of his young age is an explosives expert, suggests blowing the skeleton up. It’s not a bad idea and we consider it for a while, but decide against it just as the first jeepload of palaeontologists arrives.

(Recycled from the House of Love)

Picture it: Australia, 2000. Two queer boys, in love, in a tiny, two-man tent, pitched under a Banksia tree by a long stretch of white sandy beach. So far, so good. Now picture howling winds and driving rain. For a week.

Quite surprisingly, we didn’t even come close to strangling one another. I’ve seen plenty of relationships go down the gurgler under far less pressure than this, so I reckon we’ve done alright.

Those of you reading this overseas probably have a pretty utopian view of an Australian summer: you sit huddled around your single bar radiator with your slippers on and imagine broad white beaches, tall bronzed lifeguards, ice cold beer in the fridge and sizzling shrimp on the barbie. Well, summer this year hasn’t quite lived up to your expectations: we’re not quite huddled over the radiator, but the lifeguards are inside drinking cocoa and waiting for the rain to let up.

I suppose it’s global climate change at work, thanks very much to American capitalism, which has given us aerosol cheese-in-a-can, air-conditioned dog kennels, vaginal deodorants and the Exxon Valdez. I hope you’re all enjoying your 21st-Century lifestyles up there in Boise Hollywood, cos down here we’re wallowing in all the delightful consequences of decades of chloroflourocarbon pollution.

But of course every hole in the ozone layer has a silver lining: despite the fact that it’s been bucketing down rain since about November I’ve managed to get sunburned twice. Welcome to the 21st century, where we can burn tan in half the time it took in the old days. And when it rains, we read.

Back in our little tent at Sandon, despite the cramped conditions, the suboptimal weather and a narrowly-averted crisis involving almost running out of swizzle sticks right in the middle of cocktail hour, we managed to make the most of it. Brent, being Canadian, is accustomed to foul weather, hiking, roughing it and all that butch stuff. I, being me, am accustomed to eating good food and sipping on a cocktail while leafing through whatever reading matter is at hand. Brent comes fully equipped with a range of camping equipment – made entirely of lightweight Kevlar™ – which folds down to approximately the size of a handkerchief; I come equipped with a hat and 23 hardcover books.

While our 0.27 micron microfibre snow-resistant, UV-resistant, moose-resistant, double-gusseted, flame-retardant Kevlarâ„¢ home was buffeted by hurricane Betty, Brent flew about, madly hammering stakes back into the sand and lashing the tarp to anything that looked like it might resist the storm, while I sipped on a Pimms and read. As is my democratic right. We live in a free country, after all.

Well, sort of. Today I hear that the forces of right and might have been hard at work in Melbourne, where they have swooped on Polyester Books (one of my favourite bookstores) and seized just about every book in the store except the Women’s WeeklyTM Cookbook. How can this happen in a liberal democracy like Australia? Surely, along with those long languid summers and crystal clear seas, Australia is a fabulously mature and progressive country. I wish it were true. The sad truth is that we have one of the most oppressive regimes of censorship this side of Afghanistan, and lately it’s been getting worse, not better.

Take, for example, the recent news that the censors have banned the acclaimed French film Romance. Although it has been shown uncut in the US, the UK, Turkey and even Ireland, it cannot now be shown here. It can be seen by 16-year-olds in some Scandinavian countries, but it cannot be seen by 40-year-olds here. The Executive Director of the Melbourne International Film Festival says it’s “one of the most fascinating and articulate films to have dealt with female sexuality in recent times” but that cuts no dice with our censors. Why? According to Herald film critic Paul Byrnes, the film deals with female sexuality with gravity and intelligence. There’s a scene where a woman is (consensually) tied up with rope. There’s a scene of sexual assault.

As Byrnes points out, in this country it’s a simple matter to buy all the porno trash films you like, which “don’t take sex seriously,” but the censors won’t let adults watch a film which treats the matter of sex in an adult way.

It’d be laughable if it wasn’t such an insult to every adult Australian.

Coming back to this news after reading David Marr’s book (see over the fold for a mini-review) I can’t say I was surprised. While the xtians in this country aren’t nearly so rabid and outspoken as their north American cousins, they do wield an unreasonable amount of power. As he explains in the introduction:

I was writing about censorship, wondering why people still bothered, when it came to me that what’s at stake here is heaven. The enemies of books and magazines, of sex and music and drugs and television, of drink and dancing are Christians. And what they’re campaigning about is not this life but the next. … Ours is a very secular country but the churches remain the most resilient, most respected and best-connected lobby in the nation. Sin is their business. Heaven is their aim. Government is their partner. There’s a certain instinctive generosity in wanting to keep all us sinners on the train, but there’s also a bullying indifference here to those who count on living only one life – this one.

Free speech doesn’t exist in this country. Whether it’s subcultural books like those stocked by Polyester or films dealing maturely with sex, honesty loses out in favour of a culture of prohibition on knowledge. Whether its books, magazines, movies or the Internet, the government will do anything to restict what you can see and appease the Cardinals. The philistines win again. But like our little tent against the wind and rain, censorship can only resist the truth for so long. Eventually you have to pack up your little tent and feel the rain on your face.

It’s surprisingly refreshing.
(more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

I’m in a prison. My friend John D. is in there with me, I don’t know why but it seems to be a rather well-appointed and comfortable prison. John’s doing an interpretive dance on the theme of imprisonment. He dances divinely, sublimely, defying gravity and employing various props — the cell is well stocked with objets d’art — in a truly breathtaking performance.

A member of the audience [Audience? In prison? It's a dream, remember] takes one of the props and won’t give it back, spoiling the dance. I have to wrestle this object away from the spoiler and return it to John.

The dance is over and I’m having sex with another prisoner (not John, worse luck) — I’ll spare you the details. Afterwards, he walks through the automatic glass doors [!] of the prison, out into the snow. I can’t follow him, and he can’t return. I assume he’ll freeze to death out there.

(Recycled from the House of Love)

I’m not sure whether or not to be disappointed. I’m certainly not surprised.

The Y2K disaster turned out to be something of an anti-climax. The fireworks in Sydney were spectacular (I hear— I was on the dance floor at midnight) but the much-anticipated fireworks that were supposed to come with the end of civilisation-as-we-loathed-it never materialised. Apparently the are having a little trouble in Gambia, which the news bulletins promise is in West Africa, but apart from that it’s a fizzer. Whatever. I was on the dance floor at the time, and that’s the main thing.

But at least one Y2K promise has come true, and the House of Love now has a convenient slot for me to insert unfocused, poorly-thought-out, self-obsessed ramblings about whatever happens to take my fancy: yes, it’s a journal. Sorry if you were expecting more.

Now, any idiot can write a journal; the art is in getting someone to read it.  Before the invention of the web, all but a very very few journals were kept utterly for the author’s eyes only, and now that more people are putting their late-night thoughts into HTML, we are realising what a blessing that was. The web is groaning under the strain of crappy journals and my only prayer today is that I’m not starting another one.  What I hope to avoid here is what I think is the failing of many – pointless, self-obsessed rambling about what I had for dinner or how the guy on the bus pissed me off or how I have nothing to write that day.  I am no Samuel Pepys but I’ll try to do what good journals do – weave together my personal experiences with the big events that are taking place around me. I figured January 2000 was as propitious a time as any to start on such a foolhardy venture, so here we are.

I will not write every day – indeed, I will probably not write every week. Some of the content will be shamelessly personal, some less so. All of it will be my opinion and if you find you tend to agree with what I’ve said on other pages on this site, I invite you to check in from time to time. Some entries will be very short; others will be lengthy. There will be an index by subject, which seems to me to be a key thing lacking from every other online journal I’ve seen (although in some cases every entry would be indexed under ‘pointless self-obsessed rambling’). There will be running narratives, and in-jokes, to reward close readers, too.

I think I might have mentioned that I was on a dance floor at midnight on New Year’s Eve. I had an excellent time in the company of dear friends – human, chemical and botanical. And as it’s now close to midnight on January 2, I must be trashed. I deserve a round of applause for getting this far.

It’s always nice when you move into a new home and the neighbours roll out the welcome wagon, don’t you think?

Well, it’s all over for another year … Sydney’s month-long festival of all things queer. The parade, as always, was a delight to watch and an even bigger delight to be in. Where else in the world can you walk down the street in front of 600,000 straights and have them screaming with delight and begging you to touch them?

Casey, Claudio and I were together this year in my dear friend Kabi’s concept, Cusson’s Imperial Leather Pride. (For those outside Australia, Cusson’s Imperial Leather is a popular brand of soap.) Our float consisted of 20 queer boys and girls, dressed in leather and leis and blowing bubbles, while towing a huge Cusson’s soap package. If you’re old enough to remember the famous Cusson’s TV commercial of the early 80s, you’ll know what the word balloons saying “Tahiti looks nice”, “Simon, Tahiti” and ” Roger, Wilco” refer to.

Cussons Imperial Leather Pride

The party was fun too, as always, although the Dome was suffering from ventilation problems which made it too darn hot to dance for long. Still, we made the most of it and I got to spend a few hours in the company of the most gorgeous and lovely bunch of people in the world.

Claudio in a sea of bubbles

(Recycled from the House of Love)

It’s late November, 1998. I’m on the phone to Casey, talking about my upcoming trip to Los Angeles. He asks if there’s anything special I’d like to do while I’m there. He knows I don’t like LA, so it must be a trick question.

“Well, there is one thing…” My voice trails off.

“What? Disneyland?”

“No, we’ve been there.”

“Rodeo Drive?”

“No, you know I hate shopping. And rich people.”

“Mann’s Chinese Theatre?”

“Not even close.”

“Well what is it then?”

“I wanna see the beat where George Michael got busted.”

(more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

Today is National Sorry Day.

Some Australians will take a moment today to make a personal apology to the ’stolen generations’, the thousands of aboriginal Australians who were forcibly removed from their families from the beginning of European settlement in Australia in 1788 until as late as 1970.

"… I just couldn’t stop crying. All I could see was our little camp. My baby brother’s bottle was laying on the ground. And I could see where my brother and sisters were making mud pies in a Sunshine milk tin that we used for our tea or soup. I didn’t know where my parents were. I was sad, crying, lost; didn’t know what I was going to do …"

— from Rose’s story in Bringing Them Home

Below is my personal apology.

(more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

Well, I wanted to get to the Netherlands, but I ended up in Nederland, Colorado. Very similar, except for the absence of any windmills, clogs, tulips, coffee-shops, red-light districts, gabber parties or cycling royals.

Instead, I’m surrounded by some of the most spectacular mountains and forests I’ve ever seen. The Rocky Mountains are aptly named – huge eruptions of solid rock rising out of an enormous plain, peppered all over by some very tenacious pine trees. In the distance you can see the occasional patch of ice and snow on some of the higher peaks. (more…)

(Recycled from the House of Love)

Greetings from Desolation Sound.

Mmmm … nothing quite prepared me for the beauty of this place. I’m in British Columbia, On Cortes Island which is a tiny speck between Vancouver Island and mainland Canada.

The place we’re staying at (Casey’s parents’ summer house) is a little shack on a cliff overlooking a large tidal lagoon. The whole picture is framed with forests and oceans – the scenery is nothing short of breathtaking.

Our bed is out in the open, on the edge of the cliff, under the stars. It’s been deliciously warm every night … we watch the moon rise overhead as we fall asleep, and we wake to the sound of birdsong.

This is truly a magical place.

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