HOMOVISION.TV » times

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: AGEING (Part 2)

Swarmite Parker — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:40:25 +0000

In her book “How to Grow Old Disgracefully”, the actress Hermione Gingold remarked: “There’s nothing so ageing as the past – especially when it catches up with you. I like to live in the present”. How gay was Hermione? Well for starters her sister Angela Baddeley played iconic Mrs Bridges in the 70’s TV drama Upstairs Downstairs (? ask yer mum), Hermoine sang Sondheim on Broadway in A Little Night Music and if that wasn’t camp enough, she also found herself a lover when she was age 84. He was 21.

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: AGEING

Swarmite Parker — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:25:58 +0000

They used to sing ” Nobody loves a Fairy when she’s Forty ” back in the days of homo criminalisation but now the internet is awash with Daddies, Bears and Spanking GrandDads – thankfully nobody needs to look like Cher anymore to still be in the game. Can you imagine being rejected by a 22 year old because your not fat enough and TOO YOUNG when you’re past 50. It happens – trust me. A report came out this week about the upward trend of older users of recreational drugs suggesting on evidence that people over fifty just ain’t gonna give it up for health concerns or abstain which is why the government stance on harm reduction is the fashion. We also know that many gayers well over 40 sit at home on Gaydar or escort sites with tina or the like for companion. One wonders when Addison Lee will get a STONEWALL Award for services to the community, but the majority of older gayers just wanna have fun or the fun to continue sanely.

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: EXPECTATIONS

Swarmite Parker — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:28:41 +0000

Setting expectations too high is societies curse, which is why government and partners fail us and media is flooded at this time of year with detox trivia, diet plans and resolutions. Don’t encourage them, be stylish – wait till February or when you feel you want to, rather than need to just because it’s New Year. January is the time for looking back, not unplanned impulsive action. Take note of Dickens little orphan boy Pip in Great Expectations, “take nothing on it’s looks; take everything on evidence : there’s no better rule”.

It’s a pity that gayers take many things on it’s looks – first glance, an image, a dealer or dress code often without resort to reality, living in a dream like space. It’s easy to be optimistic in a club then discover 6 weeks later knee deep in “a relationship” that he’s psychotic, a compulsive liar or an addict. It pays to do detail sooner. Although the Pythons insisted that we look on the bright side of life, optimism is another word for DENIAL so best if you face facts quickly, take everything on evidence and move on. Though it must be noted that denial is an unconscious defence mechanism necessary for survival, which is why it’s so rampant.

None of us can survive our lives without a certain amount of denial to keep us in balance, but with denial in regards to addiction, the denial is taken to extreme and since gayers have a habit of breaking conventional bounderies, we are more prone to addiction, because we often have no boundary of when to stop. We don’t want the party to end, the unconscious spending to end, the cruising to end and the chems to end but if we don’t take stock, look back over the year, the end will come sooner than expected.

Why do people deny they need help? There are many reasons for denial in addiction. One reason is that generally people do not like to feel helpless and out of control and ironically, to observers, this is exactly what addicts are feeling. Bob Mandel of the Loving Relationship Training said ” the only guru you need are the results in your life “, but any addict or compulsive user often refuses to face facts, relying instead on the expectation that it will all end with a wave of a magic wand. It won’t. The addict will blame everything and everyone except their own substance abuse for their problems. Another reason is that the addict may be using drugs or alcohol to cover up numb or unpleasant feelings and by stripping away the denial, the unpleasant feelings will come to the surface, one of the reason why chems are the lifeboat of the scene.

The last two weeks for gayers will have sorted the men from the boys, top this with office parties and extra socialising in December it’s no wonder we crave a detox, a rest or show the white flag for the New Year. It’s expected now that we slow down and the majority will, but many will be living with a nightmare partner, flatmate or family member with the party still in full swing. If you are – seek help. You may not help the addict but you can stop yourself getting drawn into manipulated guilts, codependency and the false expectation they will wake up and come out of their coma of justification.

While not all substance abusers have suffered past traumas in their lives, an inordinate amount have, child, sexual & physical abuse is common in the addicted population. For gayers add secrets, withheld emotions, homophobia and shame to the mix. But, no matter what the cause is of the denial, the important part is that the addict ( or anyone close to the addictive person ) confront the defense mechanism head on. This may be by what some addicts describe as “hitting bottom” or can come from confrontation with family, friends or through the court systems like possession or drunk driving.

Many times an addict will lose a job, friends or family relationships because of the addiction but still find enablers to supply. Denial in addiction is not a linear course, either. The addict may be in denial at some times, and facing reality at others, so addiction in denial may be fluid especially in the beginning stages of looking at themselves or in recovery. Even for those who are far along the recovery path, falling off the wagon and denial can strike at any time and will need to be overcome once again to get back on track. Perhaps Linkin Park talked about confronting denial best in their song “Breaking the Habit” when they said, “I’ll paint it on the walls, ’cause I’m the one at fault” in acknowledgement that a habit is indeed a personal disease for which one needs to take responsibility in order to break free.

More people consider REHAB in January than at any other time of year but the real test of whether you are in an addictive compulsive spiral is to stop and see how far you get without your poison be it alcohol, chems, escorts, food, internet or procrastination. Expect nothing and allow yourself to feel anything, even a feeling of surrender and freedom. Bare in mind that there are more compulsive dependents than addicts, but addiction will always grab you by the balls when it goes unobserved – ask a crack head or meth abuser. Best if you observe now, take stock, tell the truth to someone and seek help in the areas that control you. It’s not about stopping the party it’s about knowing when to leave. Look at your life, check the evidence, own it and then decide what needs changing. Don’t expect someone else to do it for you.

More support services can be found at http://www.theswarmite.com/urban-addictions
Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous have regular LGBT meetings in London – check Google for more information.

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: XMAS BOOZE CHECK

Swarmite Parker — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:56:44 +0000

We know that Alcohol can make gayers do mad things but no one is mental enough to give up Booze before Christmas. Right? “It’s only another month before the New Year and I can get it sorted then” is the annual December mantra of hope. The page BOOZE CHECK on my own website is number 1 on Google if you tap it in, my most popular hit. Funny that, as we are led to believe by government and media that drug cartels are the greatest threat to civilisation when alcohol, the oldest known drug remains a coffer filler in taxes.

Don’t upset the horses. This brings us neatly to heroin chic and horse tranquilliser, contenders for regular off yer face activities. HEROIN for GAYERS? surely not, that’s so skag estate 1986, so dilly boy in the ’70s, well it’s all fashion retro now, visit any Narcotics Anonymous meeting in London or ANTIDOTE , the Soho LGBT substance misuse support service and you will find gay smack heads, recovering K-holers and the like. In the rush to find something higher and higher the old standby of dutch courage – BOOZE – is forgotten in the stampede.

Just because I don’t drink anymore doesn’t mean I am anti booze like a member of The Temperance Society, the problem as I found out, is not the booze or substance but the vessel it goes in and my vessel was as flooded as the Lake District . I remember someone saying “I drank to drown my problems then my problems learnt to swim”. Right. I needed help but couldn’t reach for the phone. Gayers who are alcoholics are in the minority compared to a majority who say they ” drink too much “. There is a difference, a fine line, and no one can tell you where it is, but if alcohol is costing you more than money then it makes sense to booze check.

Using December as a month to start is unrealistic as excuses abound, justifications made and duty calls. You may as well do yourself a service and get pissed till you’re ready to surrender the game and see what’s it’s like WITHOUT BOOZE in the New Year. Using alcohol to function as a remedy for social phobia is easy compared to tapping yer fingers in a dry period to prove you can live without it. People have such misconceptions of alcohol abuse, binge drinkers are the worst when it comes to porkies, lying to yourself that you don’t need it, “I’m not a daily drinker etc” is futile excuse compared to the things you do to prove the point. Just like some Class A Muscle Mary’s who don’t flinch at the dealers running costs or escorts bill of fare, who binge weekends and drink wheat grass juice in the week for detox, using gym workouts to prove they are on top to stay in the game of approval seeking. Excess can become normalised, losing the plot along the way with a chem-ed up body clock. Our bodies used to tell us when to stop, now the ego says stopping means missing out, then we moan that rejection is our own worst fear and reject the consequences of using. I have done it myself.

Office parties, group meet-ups, Shoreditch House invites, marathon clubbing weekends and being sick on the tube is all part of the vehicle called Xmas, but I have not yet scored 100 points this season witnessing sick on both inside double tube doors. The Great Escape. They never made it. No one is suggesting you adhere to the healthy units limit ( unless you’re driving ) the Government lays out, that’s gone at Happy Hour in Barcode, but it’s wise to EAT before you lash out in Soho and beyond. Have a great time and have a drink on me. You’re paying.

But some people are dreading the party season, let’s concentrate on two types. The first are the ones socially phobic, permanently shy and awkward in company and the second type could be connected to the first but is likely to worry someone just the same – the partner, boyfriend or best m8. For this group someone who changes personality or becomes abusive when drunk is nerve racking. Their Xmas is buggered before they start pulling crackers. Some are dreading going home for Xmas to face the drunken Mum or abusive Father or even worse – a drug free Christmas. Coming from a family damaged by alcohol breeds codependency and excuses, it also breeds silence when it comes to explaining London life in Vauxhall. Yes Xmas is difficult but good preparation ahead of the game can avoid worst fears. Christmas IS the most codependent time of the year and next week as the Virgin Timetable draws closer I shall focus on the coda pitfalls of going home. If you partner someone with a drinking problem, share what’s going on with friends, don’t enable the drinker and stop nagging. Make sure you have a Xmas too and avoid babysitting, heavy drinkers are amazingly resilient.

After New Year some of you may want to dry out a bit or consider purposeful using of alcohol and chems. Many support services are free and remember that paid for therapy costs no more than what you spend willy-nilly on booze and other distractions. If you have a drug or Alcohol issue maybe these guys can help in Soho : http://www.thehungerford.org/antidote.asp or check-in to The SwarmiteREHAB Booze Check Page : http://tinyurl.com/mckg6b for a New Year lifestyle makeover.

THE LEATHER BOYS: SMOKE AND LEATHERS

Christopher Brocklebank — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:04:46 +0000

How many of you old and young-timers have heard of The Leather Boys? It’s got nothing to do with Warhol or Kenneth Anger, despite the imagery it conjures up (anyway, it’s far too playful a title for Anger) and nor is there any debt to Tom of Finland. No, The Leather Boys is a 1961 British pulp novel by Gillian Freeman, later made into a New Wave Brit flick in 1963 by the aptly named Sidney Furie about two working-class, south London ton-up biker boys who find themselves surprised, unnerved & ultimately confused to discover they’re in love with each other. I just reread it, and not before time.

I became a fan of the film as a teenager, discovering it late one night on BBC2 back in the days when terrestrial telly bothered to show decent flicks. This was long before I became a swallow-tattooed card-carrying Smiths fan (St Morrissey is a huge, huge fan of this peon to proley poof passion) but it somehow seemed to reflect my feelings far greater than Queer as Folk, which was in full swing at the time and being lauded as a realistic a representation of gay life as we’d ever seen. Well… maybe it was, maybe it did reflect a certain reality. But not mine.

I suppose feeling greater affinity with two rockabilly bikers (Reg and Dick – ah, those solid monosyllabic working-class boy-names!) making nervy, burning eyes at each other across a frothy-coffee-splattered Formica table top in a Battersea café in 1963 meant that I wasn’t happy where I was. Too right! Teenage self-loathing, boys on my mind, the universe at large telling me I was The Worst Person in The World Ever because of it, the working-class suburbs of Sheffield, lack of stimulation in every sense and dying, dying, dying all the time for life to BEGIN didn’t make me too approachable.

And so I sought solace in another time, another place – albeit one where I’d have been slung in Pentonville at the first indiscretion. And this is my point – I felt so out of it, such a classic timeworn cliché of a misfit’s misfit that the only place I could recognise myself was in a three-decade old film.

Why?

I think class had as much to do with it as anything.

All the gay novels I’d come across (stop sniggering at the back, etc) either featured languid toffs in white flannels, lying on river banks and making allusions to their ‘proclivities’ and dreaming of the stable boy back at their parents’ estate, or else you got two solicitors from Richmond meeting in the gents at Paddington and one finding the other dead by his own hand after six tentative months’ of clandestine meetings. I’d read Genet, but despite my burning need to become a bohemian I didn’t much fancy being a self-loathing softy getting all wet over illiterate brutes, well into old age.

Then there were Mary Renault’s novels – a veritable ‘catalogue of upper-class buggery’. Pah. Where were my kind? They were in the post-Elvis, pre-Beatles era, engineer-booted and frothily quiffed, Romeo and Romeo in Wandsworth Town. Their tentative nervousness resonated with me, too: in the book, they don’t even kiss till page 89, and of course, all kisses in the film are off-screen (though you’ve no doubt they’ve taken place). Also in the book, the sun cuts through the curtains on The Morning After, and their awkwardness and burning need to acknowledge what they’ve done is palpable. Neither boy starts taking trips into Soho or Earl’s Court with their newly discovered desires. Neither boy seeks others of his ilk. Neither even knows what’s happening:

‘ “I love you,” Dick said. He couldn’t believe he’d said it… didn’t know how to go on. “When you kiss me and that,” he said at last, nervously, “you don’t pretend I’m a girl or anything?”

“Don’t be daft!” Reggie said. “Ow could I pretend you was a girl? You’re the wrong shape anyway.”

That’s not what I meant, thought Dick.’

And yet their love seems natural and real. Far more than any of the middle-class characters featured in the (admittedly groundbreaking) film Victim which came out the same year as Freeman’s novel, but two years before Furie’s film. In Victim, one of the sad-eyed young men says, ‘Nature played a nasty trick on me.’ But having discovered the Leather Boys, I was beginning to feel less like him and more like I might have my own Reggie one day (and I have).

Having long made good my escape and being one of the most well-read and well-viewed idiots in the western world, I still struggle to find reflections of my reality in queer literature and film and I still see all this through the prism of class and roots (for me, class is about where you’re from, not where you are). Today it seems, the nearest you’ll come to a working-class gay love story is one you dial a number to hear (‘Shagged dole officer for crisis loan – 0800 555555’) Poverty? Prostitution? Phwoar!

Unless their generation’s fondness for chuffing unfiltered Players and their gang’s love of speeding up and down slick arterial roads didn’t get them, I like to think of Reg and Dick retired together, engineer boots side by side in the hallway, living in the now as we ideally should, because ‘now’ is all there is.

COMMENT: DESIRE, CONFORMISM AND THE ELUSIVE GREAT DARK MAN

Alex Hopkins — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:18:06 +0000

“Oh Alberto, have you heard Shirley Bassey’s new album?” the shrill, camp voice rang out from the right hand toilet cubicle. “No,” grunted the blatantly bored and clearly paid for Alberto from the left hand cubicle. “Oh well, never mind,” sighed the nameless extra from Julian and Sandi. “Come over here and hold my winkle for me.”

It was an interesting moment. In the cramped, grubby confines of Brighton’s Queen’s Arms toilets I was witnessing something quite rare in gay life – the brief, crashing sound of the worlds of camp and sex meeting. It felt awkward.

As much as camp is an integral and vital part of our gay heritage, it has always been taboo to bring it into the scared confines of the boudoir. The two simply don’t seem to mix. To put it bluntly, having Like a Virgin blaring out while you’re going down on the latest piece of trade isn’t considered much of a turn on.

You only have to look at the countless personal adverts in the gay press to get a glimpse of gay men’s attitude to camp. The demand is for everything “straight acting” and “non camp.” There is no room for “fems”, Shirley Bassey lovers or over the top theatre Queens.

Looking at these adverts though you can’t help but wonder what the advertiser himself is like. Is he really some naturally muscled, butch labourer type who spends his weekdays fitting kitchens and his evenings boozing with his burly, beltching straight mates?

Or is he really just another super hyped gym queen, projecting the outward exterior of the gruff, aggressive top, when actually, on the sly he likes nothing better than to sneak home from The Hoist and chill out to Judy Garland’s Carnegie Hall concert, lypsynching mournfully to The Man That Got Away while nursing a sweet sherry?

There are many facets to every person, yet all too often on the gay scene we are expected to fit one particular mould. We are supposed to do this effortlessly and completely, naturally embodying one of the prescribed types that we are assured has the ultimate “gay” sex appeal.

I say “gay” sex appeal, because it seems that the categories that are generally considered to have sex appeal on the gay scene are surprisingly narrow. It’s about fitting the stereotype – muscle man, twink, leather queen. There’s nothing very subtle about these groups – their uniforms, postures and types of behaviour are frequently predictable and always highly visible. There is little room for personal touches or the addition of idiosyncrasies – the uniforms have to be bought in their entirety from the gay catalogues – the designer leather chaps, the tightest brand of Aussie Bums, the latest shade of self tan.

Yet all the while we are fervently fashioning ourselves in to super men some part of us knows that there’s another part of this person hidden away. It’s often the part that we know it isn’t fashionable to show. Perhaps it is the part that we worry will make us a less desirable commodity.

This secret part of ourselves has a name – it is called our individuality. Gay men are amazingly adept at wearing different masks. Mask wearing can be empowering and exciting. It can protect us. Sometimes though, the danger is that we begin to select the same two or three masks all the time and our real face is left languishing, forgotten at the bottom of the dressing up box. And there isn’t anything very special about the masks we have chosen if we are also sharing them with thousands of others.

This year has seen the release of the film of Quentin Crisp’s novel An Englishman in New York. Crisp was a man who did not believe in wearing masks at all. He was uniquely himself. While homosexual identity was evolving all around him, unabashed, he refused to change. It caused him problems. It also made him undesirable.

In his first novel, The Naked Civil Servant, Crisp famously fantasised about a figure he called The Great Dark Man, saying:- “If the Great Dark Man met me, he would not love me. If he did love me, he could not be my Great dark man.”

They are melancholy words, seemingly embodying an internalised homophobia that we like to claim belongs to the past. Yet, looking around the gay scene now, these words seem to be just as relevant as they were back then.
As gay men we are so frantic to fit the very limited moulds that we are told will make us desirable that we often lose sight of who we really are, of the person we were when they were growing up and of the dreams we once had.
It is almost as if we are ashamed to show a part of ourselves, the part that makes us stand out as an individual. Perhaps we are frightened that this will stop us finding our own great dark man.

The compulsive, almost psychotic attempts some gay men go to in order to fit these moulds seem to be evidence not only of a severe lack of self esteem, but also of a real sense of shame. It is almost as if we are buying into Crisp’s self-hating words.

Alberto, the rent boy at the Queen’s Arms that night, seemed to embody the great dark man for the camp, older queen who had bought him for however long it was. Perhaps the reason for this was because he was his exact opposite – he was butch, mean and knew nothing about Burley Shassey’s new album.

The man also knew that Alberto did not love him. Yet, as he waxed lyrical about Dame Shirley to the disinterested, petulant beauty, a sadness seemed to lurk behind his camp demeanour. Perhaps what he really craved was for this Latin stud to love him because of his individuality.

The time has come to relegate Crisp’s words to the closet. Gay men need to have the courage to step away from the crowd, to have the self-confidence to get back in touch with their quirkiness and boldly claim that the great dark man they seek will love them and that it is precisely because he loves them that he is their great dark man.

Yet only by discarding the wholly predictable masks of gay conformism can we start to search at the bottom of that dressing up box for our real faces again. How often do you hear gay men complaining that they cannot find their soul mate? Yet the truth is that until we begin to strut down Old Compton Street wearing our own faces, boldly basking in our own individuality and unashamedly sharing our eccentricities with others, we are destined to end up with someone as faceless, uncaring and ultimately as unreachable as Crisp’s dark man.

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: VIRUS LIVING

Swarmite Parker — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:06:18 +0000

In the current PC climate of rising HIV infections, when health charities place the sensibilties of poz people above prevention, many say we need to go back to basics. When this gay plague started I was there, being tested at The Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead in 1981. Doctors had flown from America because a mysterious virus had turned up in major American cities in gay men who were also chronic Hepatitis B Virus. I had recently been told that I had Cirrhosis of the Liver caused by the hep virus living in my body undetected for a decade. I was a Hep B super-carrier with an immune system unable to create the antibodies to fight the virus. I stopped drinking alcohol, dealing with my addiction to booze and drugs but my liver got worse and I continued to self-infect myself with Hepatitis B until 1996 when I cleared the virus through yogic breathwork and thousands spent on therapy, retreats and alternative approaches.

I was one of ten on the first human interferon drug trial in 1982 – there was, and there still is no cure, and I received no further medication except to manage liver failure. Everyone died on the trial except me. All gay men under the guidance of The Royal Free and St Mary’s in Paddington were tested by American doctors, hair, blood, saliva and semen, to see if we had the mysterious virus called GRID.

Gay Related Immune Deficiency.

In 1984 French & American Researchers came up with the same conclusion and called it the HIV Virus. I did not have the HIV virus and remain negative today – having survived one virus, why create another? Reading through the following quotes you will notice that nothing much has changed in 25 years. The only unspoken thread is that millions and millions of ££££’s are thrown at the AIDS Industry for 80,000 people in the UK when hardly anything is available from the Government for the University of Southhampton’s figure of 450,000 people in the UK living & dying with Hep C.

Poz gay guys who prefer to BB run a risk of becoming infected with Hep C as well as other STD’s, and the figures for gay men are rising.
Health Agencies insist ” HIV is a manageable disease with a few pills each day “. It isn’t. This is as much a scandal as those 450,000 Hep C carriers in the UK and 326,000 infected with Hep B in the UK who are left to wander in the wilderness without a day to rattle tins or gain support services. Worldwide more than 350 million people have chronic or lifelong Hepatitis B infections.

Centers For Disease Control, Atlanta, USA. 1984
“Four days later, researchers from the Pasteur Institute provided Don Francis with convincing proof that their virus, LAV, caused AIDS. In October, Francis had sent the French Scientists 30 blood samples, including 10 from the San Francisco Hepatitis B cohort of gay men who had developed AIDS, 10 from gay men with lymphadenopathy, and 10 from heterosexuals not at risk for AIDS. The samples were sent blind, marked only with code numbers. The French researchers reported to Don Francis their results : positive LAV antibody tests in 20 of the samples and negative tests in 10. Francis quickly paged through his notes to compare the code numbers. The French had accurately sorted the blood of AIDS and lymphadenopathy patients from the blood of uninfected people. Francis was elated. With the cause of AIDS found, scientists could now get on with the business of controlling the spread of the epidemic and finding a vaccine.” – AND THE BAND PLAYED ON / Randy Shilts

New York 1989
“First, I’d always been a little crazy, not clinically, just over-intense, compulsive, prone to a variety of erotic addictions and narcissistic mood swings – euphoria to despair in 3 seconds flat. Second, the backdrop of my breakdown – New York in the Eighties – was insane in itself. Third and most important, I was plugged into the epicenter of that insanity, working for Andy Warhol. the grand vizier of meaninglessness, and the most famous artist in the world. In the three years since I started working there, Andy had come to symbolize everything that was wrong with the world : hype and cleverness without soul, a Technicolor surface without depth, a glittering facade fashioned from fame, name and money; an inverted place where everything and everyone is reduced to an object and put on sale, where everyone has his fifteen minutes, where the serious is boring, the fluffy fabulous and behind this great mask of glamour and image, an abyss. It wasn’t always like this. For a long time, this world thrilled me. With every hoop my bosses held up, I jumped higher. New York was the big game and I adored it. I scheduled an appointment for the HIV test on March 30 1989. I was casual about it with friends, who warned me of my usual bravado” – SEX, DEATH, ENLIGHTENMENT / Mark Matousek

New York City 1994
“Even during the most repressive years of the AIDS crisis, a vibrant sexual playground survived in secret. The streets grew cold and scant, the neighbourhood bars thinned out, but if you knew the right someone you got taken to a place behind locked doors. Most gay men knew the right someone. The generation of gay men who have come of age in the era of AIDS are as fervent in desire as their disappearing Stonewall predecessors. In New York the night before the June 1994 Gay Pride Parade celebrating 25 years of gay liberation, the lineup of clean-cut, all -American men for a popular sex club stretched five blocks down the West Side Highway. The truth is that gay men like to have communal sex – or, as it’s called in the vulgate, orgies. Communal sex is to gay men what golf is to, well, other kinds of men: they find beauty and bonding in it. It defines the individual as part of a collective. By definition – because that is how history and social forces have conspired – “gay” is the construction of identity through sexual relations. The origin of the modern gay community arose in the simple act of two men picking each other up” – THE CRISIS OF DESIRE : AIDS AND THE FATE OF GAY BROTHERHOOD / Robin Hardy

London does not have anywhere to remember those brave souls who were struck down with AIDS. We are told that no-one dies of AIDS anymore, cancer, as example, has always reassured the family on a death certificate. If no shame exists around HIV/AIDS why not proudly proclaim on the Death Certificate: Cause of Death: Aids Related Infection.

Londoners have never dealt with the critical mass of collective grief over Aids, we have nowhere to ponder on the friends we lost, a space to leave notes, flowers and acknowledgement. Gary Henshaw of KU Bar and myself have started a Facebook group today to correct this error, aiming to create such a space for WORLD PRIDE LONDON 2012. Please join our group:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=180686542643&ref=nf

COMMENT: HIV – 20 YEARS ON

Marco Lovestar — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:31:48 +0000

As I come into the year of the 20th anniversary of my HIV positive diagnosis the gap between two observations before me is so vast I am moved to make what I am seeing public, in the hope of sparking more conversation about a subject that is a huge factor in every gay man’s life.

Every gay man has to consider HIV, has to manage the struggle between the desires for freely expressed physical sexual sensations, with the knowledge that unprotected sex can expose us to a virus for which there is no cure. For some there is an attitude of ‘get poz and get it over’, leading perhaps to a sexual liberation, to uninhibited free expression of lustful passions.

Other diseases, or overwhelming addictions to the chemicals that help us explore deepfeeling utterlyslutterly places within, often force men to slow down eventually. But many big city gay men are living life at such a pace that we take little time to reflect, slow down, and for example, think about how incredible it is that we have this global gay scene today where we can make friends, take lovers, party and play freely. We have embraced this gay existence as if it was our birthright, hardly considering that our kind have lived in secret, in shame, lived with persecution, been burnt and stoned – for hundreds, if not thousands of years. There must be some collective unconscious wounding going on here, leading perhaps to the self-destructive behaviours that blight the paradise of global gaytopia, and to the exaggerated emphasis in our gay scenes on sexuality over community, political or alternative expression of who we are.

It seems to me the craving for extreme sexually charged altered states of consciousness is due to our intense longing to really deeply feel and enjoy life. But so soon into the story of our sexual and political emancipation came an enormous shadow – HIV was for 15 years a diagnosis of premature and painful death. Nowadays it is still a lifelong condition that leads to mental and physical crises, and the need to adhere to sometimes challenging medication regimes. But HIV is the ultimate disease – it strikes at the very immune system itself, leads to failure in all parts of the body and mind. That ought to be enough to make us think, lead us to ask some deeper questions about our reality, and then maybe HIV could become a doorway into realisation of who we are and an invitation to explore the mystery of life and death

I am moved to declare that when I came to approach HIV in this way it gave me the gift of life. To raise funds for HIV projects we Walk for Life, we Dance for Life – HIV showed me that I had to wake up to the wonder that is life, look beyond the dream that western society is sold on, find myself, my passions, my creativity. To Live for Life. And I know that in the 90s there were a lot of men going through this awakening, this realisation that a life lived in the shallow end of sensation and soul is a life already half dead.

I was a young gay man excited to be out of the clutches of parents and education, racing to find pleasure and love in a big city. I just accepted life as it seemed to be. I dismissed religion and accepted a fairly bleak scientific worldview, avoided existential crisis as much as I could by not thinking about existence. But this changed when I was told in 1990 that I would die in seven years. The doctor seemed so certain, seven was the number. I accepted what he said and learnt to live with the thought echoing around my mind.

I still continued to avoid deeper thoughts about life and its impending conclusion for a few more years. When the symptoms of AIDS started to come along – KS, facial warts, digestive issues, depression. I began to feel anger, which became I guess the motivating fire that led to me open my mind to research for myself what is the nature of being human, when life is so short and easily cut off – what the hell are we all here for?

There was no shortage of research material. As much as modern society keeps this issue on the sidelines, and those who feel they have answers jealously guard their space and so often insist on their truth being the only truth, even to the extent of attacking those who believe different things… the question of who are we and what are we here for has been probably the main question of human history. Every culture asks it, great art and music is inspired by it, as are incredible acts of compassion and charity. I had refused to tackle spiritual questions since my early teenage years, but it was not lost on me that I had always been driven by a longing for love, to love and be loved, to share that feeling with friends and partners, plus to enjoy that love expressed through beautiful and wild sexuality. When I discovered that the one defining unifying aspects of faith, found in every description of the divine around the world is LOVE, I recognised that I HAD to drop all my mental phobias around spirituality and start some deeper thought.

Twenty years on I am utterly grateful for this turn around in my life. The expansion and joy it has brought is way beyond verbal description, it can only be felt. My life is filled with people I cherish and who cherish me. I constantly meet new people who are discovering layers to life, dimensions of love, who feel called to celebrate life rather than destroy it, who desire connection and communion of spirit rather than the old story of competition and division.

I meet these people anywhere – at parties, on the street, online. I meet them in numbers at events such as radical faerie gatherings, Edward Carpenter Community events, queer pagan camps, gaylovespirit retreats, and there we take the time to slow down, talk to each other, LISTEN to each other, be sensual and intimate, discover from each other and learn. Usually the amazing discoveries we make creates an urgent need to celebrate.

But here comes my second observation…….

In the 90s many many men went through powerful transformations and transfigurations. A culture of opening to our internal truth and power existed for some. At HIV centres there were healing circles where we discovered that thought directs energy and learnt to think for health, to channel vibrations of light for healing and balance. There were poetic and artistic outpourings chronicling the emotional queer story that we were all part of. This culture of self discovery has just about vanished from queer life. Freed of the imminent threat of major illness and death gays have largely gone back to intense hedonistic embrace of our freedom to exist. By the age of 25 many gay men have experienced intensities of life that many of their older brothers did not, or are also chasing after now, they have questions, we all do, that are difficult to find ways to talk about in a very secular age. And should they become positive, they will probably not be encouraged to find within themselves deeper power and truth – which in the time when so many were dying was all we could do. Newly diagnosed are encouraged to live healthy (which they probably wont), take the tablets (which perhaps not EVERYONE needs to do) and continue to BE GOOD CITIZENS, working and contributing taxes etc.

HIV became for me a symbol – a push to recognise that HEALING IS VITAL. This is the human condition. We accumulate wounds during life (are maybe born with them already in place), and we die. Yet we are all pretty much driven to enjoy life – to love, to play, to celebrate – this is our nature. The wounds and fear of death prevent us from fully feeling and appreciating the love, the play, the celebration. Maybe we use drugs to cut through our wounded places and open us to ecstatic experience – all too often the comedown brings the wounds come back online. Though I would never dismiss the power of ecstatic heights to transform every aspect of our lives and heal some of the deepest darkest places. This may happen by chance, embraced consciously, ecstasy (the state of being) may turn out to be one of the most powerful healing practices available to human beings.

I was brought up in an educational and social environment where it was the accepted, normal and cool thing to dismiss religion and all things spiritual. I believe for the young since my youth this tendency has only increased. To break through this mindset and humble myself enough to ask questions of the universe and accept my ignorance on the subject was a second coming out. What I notice is, although I meet others all the time who are embracing the same journey, our collective gay life can get lost in the shallow end of existence. But swimming into the depths is even more fun. We are a people, a part of humanity, largely driven by joyful and creative lusts, but for all sorts of easily understood reasons one part of us is largely undeveloped – our spirits. Our potential in life as soul healers, peacemakers, radical thinkers and artists is still largely hidden in shadows of shame. Although there are many of us who are entertainers, or who work in healing and caring professions, and although we are famed for our ability to party, we also live with too much shallowness, drug and alcohol damage, and mental and physical disease in our urban communities. But on the outskirts of gay life, often in forests, on mountains or seashores, in castles, mansions or campsites – a few are meeting and taking our ability to connect and feel further. Taking the time to go beyond appearances, to hear new ideas, to discover the magic of life lived in an atmosphere of deeper community and respect. Most of us live in the cities and we return to our homes charged with energy from being connected to nature and to the loving hearts of other queers.

I have been positive twenty years. That is half of the 40 years that we have been free legally in certain parts of the world to explore and express who we are, and how we love. We could benefit from acknowledging that the tale of gay life is at a very early stage, and nothing should be taken for granted. There have been flourishes of gay liberty at previous points in history, they have never lasted long, we have been persecuted back underground. Our current freedoms should not be taken for granted, and of course those freedoms are not enjoyed by our kind the world over. And as a collective living openly in ways we choose, unlike at any other time in human history, we may have hardly begun to delve collectively into the magical, mysterious depths of our being, power and love.

Martin Lovestar is leading a World AIDS Day talking circle to talk about the impact HIV has had on the gay community. Details:

Gmfa: “Take Responsibility for Safer Sex” (homovision.tv)

GAY MAN KILLED IN HONOUR KILLING

HOMOVISION — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:17:11 +0000

The New York Times today reports on the death of a 26 year old gay guy in Istanbul, the victim of what sociologists say is the first gay honour killing in Turkey.

According to prosecutors Ahmet Yildiz, an openly gay man, was shot five times as he left his apartment. His killer allegedly his father, who travelled 600 miles from his hometown to Istanbul. Yildiz’s body remains unclaimed by his family.

Yildiz was the only son of a deeply religious Kurdish family. His father wanted him to see a doctor and an iman in order to cure him of his homosexuality.

Gay rights groups argue that there is an increasingly open homophobia in Turkey. The military, which is the guardian of Turkey’s secular state, regards homosexuality as a disorder.

Last year, a local Istanbul court ruled in favor of disbanding the offices of Lambda, the country’s leading gay rights group, after a complaint that it offended public morality, although the decision was later overturned.

Read the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/world/europe/26turkey.html

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: HOPE

Swarmite Parker — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 06:52:06 +0000

As we approach World AIDS Day, many gay men in their forties can’t believe they are still alive. They made it. They survived the collective grief of a virus halted in it’s tracks by combos. Gay Men lost their identity and faith to AIDS and didn’t know how to relate to a possible cure in the untold numbness of emotion. In May 1996 my client Paul had once again ended up in the Middlesex with an AIDS related infection four days before we were due to fly to Bodrum in Turkey and told by doctors that he was likely to die. I had worked with him preparing for death and completing his life goals. He wanted a last planned holiday so I was asked to go as his carer and agreed. For 2 years I exclusively worked with those HIV+ having a CD4 count under 50, Paul had a CD4 count of 10 for a year and now it was down to 2. I said in the hospital ” Paul, where do you want to die? Here or in Turkey? ” Turkey he said, quick as a flash. Come on then, discharge yourself, we’re off to Turkey, and so we did, hiding bottles of meds in cabin bags that needed fridge temperatures on the plane and hotel arrival. At the airport he bought GAY TIMES and intrigued to see his own doctors photo on the news page heralding some kind of combination therapy research. ” I’ll ask him about that on return if I get back in one piece” he said.

We had a drama-free health break in Bodrum, and highlighted by 3 buffed up gayers beach walking, one wearing very small speedos and a pair of new Timberlands with laces out, boot tongues up – we later learnt an american from Miami had sent them and proudly worn they were. Using beach gaydar we were spotted and they greeted us with handshakes and the words ” Hi we’re Sexy Gays “. Very scorchio Turkish Satellite TV use of english. LOL. If only UK guys were that forward. They took us sightseeing along the castle wall and what was like a gay bar with tranny drag. “Much better than a bed in the Middlesex wired up” Paul said. We returned to the UK with his 2 CD4’s intact and straight to his doc who soon guinea pigged him on combos. In November that same year I went on holiday and for the first time in 14 years no one had died when I got back. Hope had arrived. Pauls CD4 shot to over 100 on combos and lived another 3 years before the virus took his last breath in 1999.

So what happened after combos’s? Hope springs eternal. Eric Rofe, a longtime AIDS activist wrote DRY BONES BREATHE – Gay Men creating Post-AIDS Identities and Culture (published 1998) and feared a ” second wave ” of infection after combos. He wrote ” as the most intensive period of AIDS death occurred from 1989-1995 there was little room for alternative understandings of the event called AIDS. While the corpses piled up and discussions of a ” second wave ” of gay male infections became increasingly prevalent, the pep-rally campaigns launched in the mid-1980’s were amplified. We repeatedly reminded one another to “Be Here for the Cure”, “Practice Safe Sex Every Time”, and “ACT UP, Fight Back, Fight AIDS”.

Now in 2009, the hope we had then has drained away with attention fatigue, unimagined levels of recreational drug use compared to 15 years ago, facilitated by pc policies acted out by THT, GMFA & CHAPS to support the sensibilities of poz people and ignoring the needs of those remaining negative by employing conscious action EVERY time they have sex, within or outside a relationship. Young gayers were told the war is over – we have PEP. Check out Gaydar profiles and you will see that Safer Sex : Sometimes is more prevalent than ALWAYS. Do people really hope they wont get infected but BB anyway because they got away with it last time? Hoping a new relationship will work out is very different from hoping to escape infection, a new relationship you can always leave if it doesn’t work out, but HIV poz is for life, and over 30 years of immune system damage, alongside the ageing process and the effects of prescribed combos, side effects and recreational horse tranquiliser for fun does not make a good look. Wishin’ and Hopin’ is fools paradise.

Eric Roffes prophecy has come true – a second wave of infection – with a new devil may care sensibility. In the 80’s we were forced through fear to become always vigilant, it’s a pity that it’s just clothes and the eighties that have become retro fashionable – we badly need to swing away from the current ” manageable disease concept ” and return to more harder hitting messages of the Dynasty period to focus on prevention instead of BB and slings. If we don’t more gayers will be killed by their own arrows. I think of those three ” sexy gays ” in Turkey, who can’t flick through the gay press in Barcode, yawning at yet another THT Hot Sex campaign, what of them and gayers in other countries who can’t just pop into Dean Street for a 1 hour HIV test result with ease. In the early 90’s the UK was the mantle of HIV education for the developing world using our resources to bring HOPE to those affected by HIV/AIDS. When I think of Paul and all my friends & lovers who died I wonder how they would view the current climate, the apathy that medical advances has brought and why young gayers think taking pills for the rest of their lives adds up to some kind of freedom.

More Swarmite blog experience, strength and hope resides @ http://www.theswarmite.com

Gmfa: “Take Responsibility for Safer Sex” (homovision.tv)
HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: SACRIFICE (homovision.tv)
Brit Designer Backs World Aids Day (homovision.tv)

COMMENT: Hedonism, HIV and the importance of talking

Alex Hopkins — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:52:41 +0000

Everyone has had the odd lost night once in a while. The type when you find yourself stumbling on to the first tube in the morning or, heaven forbid, precariously negotiating your way through the rush hour commuters. There can be something refreshingly beautiful about the experience. At their best these nights can represent a moment of epiphany.

Gay men have a perhaps not underserved reputation for hedonism. After decades of closeted persecution, the 1970s became our moment of unadulterated freedom. Shame was no longer our default mechanism, but a wasted emotion. The lost nights all merged into one in a gloriously wild celebration of sexuality. We created new ways of exploring our bodies and minds and fathomed out a defiantly different, uncompromising lifestyle – the polar opposite of the society that had condemned us for so long.

The spell was broken with AIDS. A decimated community rebuilt itself from ground zero. Men who until then could have been accused of being shallow and living only for selfish pleasure came together to form a supportive family. There were no other choices – kinship was the only key to their survival.

In an age where we have perhaps lost that need for such an obvious political struggle we have also lost that need to care, communicate and support one another. I say we have lost the need for an obvious political struggle, yet conversely it is blatantly obvious to me what we need to struggle to achieve.

The drug abuse, the unsafe sex, the rise in HIV rates and the crushing loneliness I see on London’s gay scene are perfectly obvious – frighteningly so. Do we really have to wait for yet more new HIV infections to emerge before something is done? How many more GHB overdoses do we need to hear about? Is the elimination of all of this not reason enough to fight?

Just as it was in our darkest hour in the 1980s, communication is the key to addressing these issues. People need to come together and discuss how they feel. People’s behaviour needs to be challenged – the low self esteem that leads to this behaviour must be confronted. Opportunities and forums for this in today’s gay community are few and far in between.

There is something disarmingly faceless about gay London now. The need to conform to a macho stereotype is almost stifling. Difference is often ostracised, or even worse simply ignored. Talking is not fashionable. Look at the profiles on gay ‘dating’ websites with their ubiquitous body shots. Where are the faces?

The figures who dominate these sites are, not infrequently, the ‘Vauxhall Tribe.’ They will spend all week in the gym before hitting the same weekend clubs. Even if they didn’t take so many drugs that they could not remember the weekend’s shenanigans it would make no difference, simply because there is nothing different or worthwhile to remember anyway. It’s a learned pattern of behaviour based on purely visuals – the way they flex their muscles to catch the strobes, that over practised pose in the sauna every Sunday morning.

These lost nights represent nothing new or beautiful. Meaningful interaction and conversation is often non-existent. Yet slouched against the walls of the club or sauna, the unspoken cry for attention often betrays a crushing loneliness and desperation at the inability to find the right words to express numbed feelings.

Sex and drugs have always played a part in our culture and always will. In the past, however, we used them to explore exciting, fresh dimensions of our collective psyche. There was a bold sense of being in control. We used the self discovery they offered to show the straight world that we were as good as them and ten times more innovative – and most importantly, we did this as a more unified body. That pioneering spirit has gone. What’s left is a deadened march of purposeless zombies, as stale and bleak as any Tuesday comedown.

Feelings are not particularly fashionable in modern gay life. They are not commercial. They do not sell magazine copy like the Aussie Bum and Abercrombie and Fitch models. These are the people that we are told to emulate – it is these lives that the ‘Vauxhall Tribe’ strive to adopt with the ruthless gym and drug toil. In their minds the more they stick up their noses and swallow the closer they are to this Peter Pan fairy tale version of gay life.

The images that we are taught to consume as gay men help precipitate the feelings of loneliness, isolation and the subsequent playing out of self-destructive behaviour that is swamping and threatening to obliterate today’s gay scene.

Talking is the only way that an individual can build sustainable, meaningful relationships. It is the only way that we can analyse, deconstruct and make sense of our actions. It is the only way that we can create intimacy and grasp some semblance of solace. The further we move away from the ability to hold a conversation into the impersonality of the merely visual, the further we stray from reality. Everyone needs the escapism of the odd lost night, but when it becomes our only way of interacting, we surrender to an anaesthetized universe that is ultimately as dark and companionless as the depths of any railway arch.

Alex Hopkins is a writer and journalist. His blog can be found at http://alexhopkins.wordpress.com/

GAY BUSINESSMAN DIES AFTER PUNCH THRILL SESSION

Simon McD — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:37:44 +0000

The Times reports today how a gay businessman died after paying a man to punch him as part of a sex fetish.

Colin Butler, 49, died after a session with Keiran Avery, 21. Butler was repeatedly punched, kicked and stamped on and suffered fractures to his face, neck and ribs.

Amjad Malik, prosecuting, told the jury: “You will hear that Colin Butler was a homosexual man and he had certain sexual preferences. He obtained sexual excitement from physical violence. He enjoyed violently taking part in hitting other men, usually with his fists. He also liked being punished to his face and indeed to his body. He also obtained sexual excitement watching other men fight.”

It was alleged that Avery had been drinking with Mr Butler before he became angry and launched his violent attack near Mr Butler’s home in High Wycombe on October 24 last year.

Avery denies murder, but admits to manslaughter. The case continues.

HOMOVISION.TV » times

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: AGEING (Part 2)

RELATED POSTS:

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: AGEING

RELATED POSTS:

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: EXPECTATIONS

RELATED POSTS:

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: XMAS BOOZE CHECK

RELATED POSTS:

THE LEATHER BOYS: SMOKE AND LEATHERS

RELATED POSTS:

COMMENT: DESIRE, CONFORMISM AND THE ELUSIVE GREAT DARK MAN

RELATED POSTS:

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: VIRUS LIVING

RELATED POSTS:

COMMENT: HIV – 20 YEARS ON

RELATED POSTS:

GAY MAN KILLED IN HONOUR KILLING

RELATED POSTS:

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: HOPE

RELATED POSTS:

COMMENT: Hedonism, HIV and the importance of talking

RELATED POSTS:

GAY BUSINESSMAN DIES AFTER PUNCH THRILL SESSION

RELATED POSTS:

HOMOVISION.TV » times

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: AGEING (Part 2)

RELATED POSTS:

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: AGEING

RELATED POSTS:

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: EXPECTATIONS

RELATED POSTS:

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: XMAS BOOZE CHECK

RELATED POSTS:

THE LEATHER BOYS: SMOKE AND LEATHERS

RELATED POSTS:

COMMENT: DESIRE, CONFORMISM AND THE ELUSIVE GREAT DARK MAN

RELATED POSTS:

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: VIRUS LIVING

RELATED POSTS:

COMMENT: HIV – 20 YEARS ON

Related articles:

RELATED POSTS:

GAY MAN KILLED IN HONOUR KILLING

RELATED POSTS:

HOMOVISION REHAB with THE SWARMITE: HOPE

Related articles:

RELATED POSTS:

COMMENT: Hedonism, HIV and the importance of talking

RELATED POSTS:

GAY BUSINESSMAN DIES AFTER PUNCH THRILL SESSION

RELATED POSTS: