Condom Fatigue

Condom manufacturer Trojan says young people are engaging in risky sex by not using condoms during oral sex.

Pardon my cynicism, but my first reaction to this was that it was a grab for greater sales by the manufacturer.

Now I don't know about you, but I detest condoms. The sight of a condom pack - let alone the sound of one being ripped open - induces instant flaccidity. And I am not alone - studies show one of the reasons for the increase in risky sex among gay men is condom droop, leading men to either top without one, or turn bottom when their erection is lost, or both.

Since I'm as scared as the next fag of catching HIV, and since negotiating condomless anal sex is about as exciting as listening to my partner rattle off AFL stats - anal sex has been off my menu for the last few years. Sex is the most intimate possible skin-on-skin contact - a rubber destroys that.

Now I'm being told to use a condom during oral sex. So what do I do now? Give up sex altogether?

The Trojan report says more than 60% of gay men won't use a condom during oral sex because they don't like the taste - no argument there - and says that can be overcome by using one of their flavoured varieties.

Well, to put it crudely, when I suck a dick, I want to taste dick, not rubber, nor even strawberry, mint, citrus, salt'n'vinegar or roast chicken. I want skin on skin, mucous membrane on mucous membrane.

Reports suggest more than a third of men feel - and react - as I do when it a condom appears on the menu.

We're starting to see ads for mentholated condoms - cool on contact, heating up with friction, pleasant flavour - in an attempt to overcome both condom droop and the yuck taste factor.

Durex is said to be going one stage further, developing a condom impregnated with a viagra-like chemical to stimulate and maintain hardness, which is due for relase in a few months.

Bully for them - but in the meantime, what do we do? What do YOU do?

We have liftoff

After many false starts my plans for a daily half-hour GLBTI news and current affairs show on Joy Melbourne 94.9fm (www.joy.org.au) have finally come to fruition.

Start date is 6.30 - 7.00 pm AEST Monday May 30th.

Is marriage what we want?

I'm not a desperately social animal, so it was something of an adventure for me to get out to a farewell party for a friend who is off to work on radio in Vietnam for the next couple of years. There I met a charming group of young lesbians - not listeners to Joy 'because the music's crap' (well it is mostly chosen by dance-party gay bois), but very interested in GLBTI news from around the world and my Rainbow Report.

"So what's the big gay news right now?" challenged one. So I gave a rundown on the Fiji case, and mentioned the ongoing battles over gay marriage around the world.

I was asked what I thought about gay marriage, and I gave the standard answer - it's important that we should have the same rights, responsibilities and opportunities as anyone else, so although I was somewhat personally ambivalent about gay marriage, I thought it was essential.

"I don't agree," said my questioner, "I think we should be campaigning to abolish marriage and have civil unions for everyone."

I don't think I'd go that far, but I immediately thought of France, where they introduced "Civil Solidarity Pacts" (civil unions to you and me), but made them available to anyone regardless of sexual orientation. Marriage remains reserved for hetero's.

Since they were introduced, lot's of heterosexual couples have chosen them instead of maarriage - either as a stepping stone on the way, or as a genuine and more egalitarian alternative, without all the religious and ownership overtones of matrimony.

So it seems to me the best all-round discrimination-free solution is to craft civil unions open to all as the only state-sanctioned legal-coupling mechanism, and let marriage be a purely religious event with no state involvement. Relationships would be recognised on the signing of a civil union contract, and those who wanted the additional frills and furbelows of marriage could go to church/mosque/synagogue/temple and have a marriage as the icing on the wedding-cake.

After all, aren't church and state supposed to be separate anyway? What are these religious people doing usurping a state function - the legal sanctioning of a domestic partnership - anyway?

Not in my name

Another of those "wish I'd said this" columns. The Guardian can be tediously PC at times but hits the nail firmly on the head with this one.

How dare Tony Blair genuflect on our behalf before the corpse of a man whose edicts killed millions?
Polly Toynbee / Friday April 8, 2005

With the clash of two state funerals and a wedding, unreason is in full flood this week. Yet again, rationalists who thought they understood this secular, sceptical age have been shocked at the coverage from Rome. The BBC airwaves have disgraced themselves. The Mail went mad with its front-page headlines, "Safe in Heaven" and the next day "Amen". Even this august organ, which sprang from the loins of nonconformist dissent, astounded many readers with its broad acres of Pope reverencing. Poor old Prince Rainier of that squalid little tax haven missed his full Hello! death rites through bad timing.

The arcane flummery brings forth dusty academics in Vaticanology, the Act of Settlement and laws of Monegasque succession. These pantomimes of power fascinate in their quaintness, but they signify nothing beyond momentary frisson. The millions pouring into Rome (pray there is no Mecca-style disaster) herald no resurgence of atholicism. The devout are there, but this is essentially a Diana moment, a Queen Mother's catafalque. People queue to join great public spectacles, hoping it's a tell-my-grandchildren event. Communing with public emotion is easy now travel is cheap. These things are driven by rolling, unctuous television telling people a great event is unfolding, focusing on the few hysterics in tears and not the many who come to feel their pain.

Bill Clinton had it right yesterday: "The man knows how to build a crowd." Curiously, the celebrity nature of this event - a must-do for 200 world leaders - signifies the opposite of what it seems. It shows how far people have forgotten what the church really is, how profoundly ignorant and indifferent they have become to history and theology. Hell, he was just a good ol' boy, wore white, blessed folk, prayed for peace - why not?

In Europe church attendance is plummeting, even in Poland, the heart of reactionary Catholicism. Here the young are clueless about the most basic Christian stories. How about the DJ who opened his show with "Happy Good Friday!" Art galleries now need to explain the agony in the garden, the raising of Lazarus and even the nnunciation. In surveys, half the population couldn't say what Easter meant. It is precisely this insouciant ignorance that lets people emote with the flow; they know not what they do.

The Vatican is not a charming Monaco for tourists collecting Ruritanian stamps or gazing at past glories in the Sistine Chapel. It is a modern, potent force for cruelty and hypocrisy. It has weak temporal power, so George Bush can safely pray at the corpse of the man who criticised the Iraq war and capital punishment; it simply didn't matter as the Pope never made a serious issue of it or ordered the US church to take strong action.

The Vatican's deeper power is in its personal authority over 1.3 billion worshippers, which is strongest over the poorest, most helpless devotees. With its ban on condoms the church has caused the death of millions of Catholics and others in areas dominated by Catholic missionaries, in Africa and right across the world. In countries where 50% are infected, millions of very young Aids orphans are today's immediate victims of the curia. Refusing support to all who offer condoms, spreading the lie that the Aids virus passes easily through microscopic holes in condoms - this irresponsibility is beyond all comprehension.

This is said often, even in this unctuous week - and yet still it does not permeate. He was a good, caring man nevertheless, they say, as if it were a minor aberration. But genuflecting before this corpse is scarcely different to parading past Lenin: they both put extreme ideology before human life and happiness, at unimaginable human cost. How dare our prime minister go there in our name to give the Vatican our approval for this? Will he think of Africa when on his knees today? I trust history will some day express astonishment at moral outrage wasted on sexual trivia while papal celebrity and charisma cloaked this great Vatican crime.

The editor of the Catholic Herald was somewhat Jesuitical when I argued with him in a BBC studio yesterday. He asked how the Pope could be blamed when all the church calls for is sex within marriage and abstinence. But abstinence and celibacy are not the human condition. If the Vatican learned anything about humanity, it would humbly meditate on 4,450 Catholic clergy in the US alone accused of molesting children since 1950, and no doubt as many in Catholic churches elsewhere still in denial.

The scale of it is breathtaking yet not at all surprising: most humans are sexual beings. A Vatican edict in the 1960s threatened to excommunicate anyone breaking secrecy on child sex allegations, and guaranteed that ever more children continued to suffer. And within its walls the Vatican shields an American priest from allegations.

Still the Vatican turns a blind eye to this most repugnant and damaging of all sexual practices, the suffering little children whose priests come unto them. Yet at the same time it thunders disapproval of sex in every other more innocent circumstance, blighting the lives of millions with its teaching on gays, divorce, abortion and unrealistic self-denial. There is no reckoning how many of the world's poorest women have died giving birth to more children than they can survive; contraception is women's true saviour.

In 1971 I interviewed Mother Teresa and asked how she justified letting starving babies be born to die on Calcutta streets for lack of contraception. She said sublimely that every baby entering the world was another soul created in praise of God, even if it lived only a few hours. She was never keen on cures: suffering was a gift of God that enabled those who cared for the afflicted to demonstrate their love. She was beatified by John Paul II for their shared religious mania. Those who met them talk of an aura of love, power, listening and intensity. But goodness is in doing good; good intent is no excuse for murderous error.

Today's saccharine sanctimony will try to whiten the sepulchre of yet another Pope whose obscurantist faith has caused pointless suffering; it is no defence that he was only obeying higher orders.

At the funeral will be a convocation of mullahs, rabbis and all the other medieval faiths that increasingly conspire together against modernity. Islamic groups are sternly warning the Vatican to stand firm against liberal influences on homosexuality, abortion, contraception and the ordination of women. What is it about religion that unites them all on sex? It always expresses itself as disgust for women's bodies, leading to a need to suppress women ltogether. Why is controlling women's bodies the shared battle flag of every faith?

Disgracefully, the European rich quietly ignore the church's outlandish teachings on contraception without rebelling on behalf of the helpless third-world poor who die for their misplaced faith. Those "civilised" Catholics have as much blood on their hands as the Vatican they support. They are like the Bollinger Bolsheviks who defended the USSR and a murderous ideology that they could do much to change. For today, just remember what lies beneath all this magnificent display.

Rex Wockner nails the gayisms we could - and should - do without

There are certain 'markers' which are taken to be indispensable to a gay identity, such as cruising saunas, doing circuit parties and so on, but in reality these are only the self-centred indulgences of a narcissistic minority. An honest gay identity isn't defined that way, says Rex Wockner, and I agree with him. As he says, be true to your self - there's nothing as sexy as authenticity.

Some years ago - too many to count - I remember a conversation with an older queen - the age I am now - who looked at me in surprise when I said I didn't cruise beats. What about saunas? No. What about parks? Backrooms? No. No.

Hmph! she snorted, so you're not really gay then, are you!!

Oh yes I am :-)

An Antidote to Grief

The instant hagiography being created around the late Pope makes me want to puke. This was not a great and good man, but a throwback to the era of medieval despots, the Inquisition, and the rule of theocracy.

Paul Varnell of the Chicago Free Press provides a salutuary counterbalance to all the current nonsense.

Watching the hordes pouring out their superficial self-indulgent grief over this person is strongly reminiscent of the orgy of self-flagallation that accompanied the death and funeral of another modern media 'saint' - Princess Diana.

Thankfully that orgasm of lachrymosity seemed to get Dubious Di out of everyone's system: since then she has more or less disappeared off the radar, her shrine unvisited, her memorial a joke, except to a faithful few.

I suspect the same thing will happen with JP2: once people are over the shock he'll be bundled off into the filing cabinet of history with a sense of profound releif. People loved them both, in the same way they loved Lisa McCune's character in Blue Heelers, but deep down, everyone is profoundly, if guiltily, glad they're gone. Hence the excessive ME ME ME LOOK HOW SAD I AM mourning. The prevailing underlying sentiment is actually one of THANK GOD THAT'S OVER!!!

Amen to that

From Rex Wockner's 'Quote Unquote"

"A portion of the gay population -- maybe 20 percent, [gay author and
historian Charles] Kaiser estimates -- conducts itself in ways that are
not only reckless but just plain disgusting. Unprotected, promiscuous
sex in bathhouses and at parties and using drugs such as crystal meth to
prolong both desire and performance are practices that should be no more
acceptable for gays than for heterosexuals. Gays don't get some sort of
pass just because they're gay."

--Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, Feb. 17.

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"A straight man knows that if he knocks a woman up, he's on the hook for
child-support payments for 18 years. [I propose that if you] infect
someone with HIV out of malice or negligence ... the state [should] come
after you for half the cost of the meds the person you infected is going
to need. (The man you infected is 50 percent responsible for his own
infection.) Once a few dozen men in New York City, San Francisco,
Toronto, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and Vancouver are having their
wages docked for drug-support payments, other gay men will be a lot more
careful about not spreading HIV. Trojan won't be able to make condoms
fast enough."

--Syndicated gay columnist Dan Savage, Feb. 24.

<><><>

"We worry about homophobia, but what is more homophobic than for one gay
man to intentionally expose another gay man to HIV? ... This new and
deadly strain of HIV is not as lethal as our own amoral behavior. The
mortal danger to the gay community is not from a new bug or from an
intrusive government or from a frightened public, it is from our own
selfishness, arrogance and indifference."

--Former Philadelphia AIDS Task Force counselor Harry E. Adamson writing
in the Philadelphia Daily News, Feb. 28.

Fox News - The Unbiased Medium

Fox News hosts muse about gay rights

The Big Story host John Gibson in his March 16 "My Word":

Gays can't have kids -- other than going to the abandoned kids store and getting one or two, or borrowing sperm from someone with more sperm than brains -- so by definition they're out of the marriage game.

Sean Hannity on the March 16 edition of Hannity & Colmes:

BOB BECKEL (guest co-host): Let me just say one thing about the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts, when they allow gay Boy Scouts in the Boy Scouts, then that won't be a problem for me. But they don't.

HANNITY: But they can have the Gay Scouts if they want, if they don't like the values of the Boy Scouts.

Bill O'Reilly on the March 15 edition of Westwood One's The Radio Factor:

O'REILLY: You know, the Founding Fathers didn't write anything into the Constitution about gay marriage. Because back then, if you were gay, they hung you.
So -- you couldn't get married 'cause they put you in the rack. You know, if you were runnin' around wearing a chartreuse hat, you were in lots of trouble. So, we didn't even have to worry about these people gettin' married because if they come out of their closet in the log cabin -- somebody'll shoot them in the head. So, there really wasn't an issue back in the Founding Fathers.

The Stereotype is TRUE

The Singapore sgboy website has published A gay man's reaction to The Nation party , which strikes not a few raw nerves on the idiocy that passes for gay culture nowadays. Well what can I say! Read and learn.

We have indeed been consumed by the consumerist culture, haven't we?

I recall some years ago, working on HIM magazine in London, when the editor went to New York for a while and came back full of plans to publish lots of stories about party drugs, buffing up at the gym, and all the shit we now take for granted as part of 'the gay lifestyle'.

Well actually, folks, it ain't: it's the American gay lifestyle, invented in New York back in the 1970's and 1980's, and exported to the world courtesy of guys like my editor. He entitled his first series on gym-culture - Fit For Sex.

Dickburger Restaurants

Since then, every gay bar in the world has come to look like every other. Every dance party is the same. All the guys are the same. Instead of a burger chain, gay venues are now a series of near-identical dickburger joints

You can travel the world and everything feels just like the same, like you never left. In the days when I spent time in the US and Europe, I remember one evening in a gay bar in Boston Massachusetts. I'd had a few drinks, chatted to a few guys, but decided to head on home. There was a depressing sameness, been-there-done-that feel about it all, topped off by some guy who just walked up to me out of the gloom and opened the conversation with "come out back with me and I'll blow you," and then got really aggressive when I politely declined.

As I headed for the exit, I experienced a strange moment of dislocation, a variation on deja vu. I was not sure what city I would find on the other side of the door. Would it be London? New York? Amsterdam? Paris? Sydney? Did it matter?

It's only a cartoon, stupid

Inside, every place, every guy, is a clone of someone else, someone who never really existed except perhaps in a Tom of Finland cartoon.

Perhaps you think I exaggerate the influence of cartoons - not just Tof, but kids cartoons like He-Man, for example? There's one bodybuilder on gay.com and gaydar who doesn't have a pic on his profiles, just a cartoon of an impossibly musclebound lunkhead almost crushed by the gigantic barbell he's trying to lift, as an icon of what this poor deluded man is working to be. He hasn't figured out that the cartoon is a joke, an exaggeration. He's taken it as a straightforward illustration.

Lots of not-very-bright guys seem to have had the same moment of fake revelation: "Hey, if I inject a few steroids, spend a few mindnumbing hours a day in a gym, I can look like a cartoon, and everyone will want to fuck with me."

Often the very same dumbos think sexual reality means hey have to fuck like in the porno movies: so they use crystal, viagra, bum-numbing herbal gel, ecstasy, whatever, to render THAT fantasy into a semblance of reality.

The literal-mindedness of some people is astonishing.

This cartoon juggernaut of fake manufactured masculinity and sexuality has steamrollered almost all trace of any real gay culture into the dirt. Talk about society, marriage, children, the future, creasting a gay heritage? No time for that mate, working too hard getting buff and getting fucked.

Senator Kay Patterson

I have just received a response to my letter to the above Minister, which I wrote before the government passed it's ban on gay marriage. Despite the fact that faxes from this person spew out of the machine at the station several times most days (this woman's responsible for the pulping of countless trees!) she couldn't get round to responding till now, it seems.

Her letter - I won't bore you with it - is virtually a carbon copy of what many of you will have received on this topic from other government mionisters and MPs, and merely reiterates the governments actions and views, without in any way attempting to address the real issues involved. So I won't bore you with it.

But I will share my reply.


Yr ref: KP:br 01.05

Dear Senator Patterson,

Thank you for your (extremely belated) response to my correspondence on the subject of same sex marriage. I would like to point out a few things.

Firstly, the issue is not one of marriage, per se. The issue is equality and fairness, marriage merely the means.

I have been in a monogamous relationship with my partner for over twelve years now, which I think is fair to say is better than many heterosexuals – and even more politicians! – seem to be able to manage.

Yet our relationship is not recognised as having the same value or status as one of those common casual and temporary unions, merely because we are of the same gender. In order to achieve near-parity of recognition, we are forced to jump through a number of difficult and expensive legal hoops, none of which would be necessary if we could simply have our union recognised as having equal status and value to your own.

The simplest and most straightforward way to achieve this is marriage, with identical rights, privileges and responsibilities. This would send a clear message that we are equal citizens in this country.

I recognise that a lengthy period of ‘civil unions’ of steadily increasing scope would be necessary on the road to this, as has been embarked upon by many European countries, in order to accustom the generality of the population to the fact that we are, in fact, not really any different to anyone else.

The responsible course for any politician of any party is to lay out such a road map, complete with timelines and milestones, to redress the current inequality. This is something called ‘leadership’, in contrast to the servile and cynical pandering to a mob of hysterical self-styled “Christians”, in which your party has indulged itself.

Secondly, very onerous responsibilities are laid upon those who enter parliament and especially upon those who take ministerial responsibilities. Once you are in that position, you have a legal and moral duty to use your powers for the benefit of all Australians, and not just those who belong to your party, or vote for you. This is especially true in regard to minorities, for if this principle is not strictly adhered to, the rights of minorities can be trampled by the tyranny of the majority, as has happened in this instance.

Under normal circumstances ministers of low integrity avoid the odium of acting on behalf of minorities that their supporters dislike, by leaving open avenues of appeal to the courts. Indeed, the courts are the major bulwarks against this kind of abuse of majority power.

In this instance, not only did your government abuse it’s powers in legally enshrining second-class status for a significant minority of your citizens, but also acted in such a way as to bar all avenues of redress via the courts. This is dictatorial, not democratic behaviour, and you should be ashamed of having participated in it.

Thirdly, not only did you consign the said minority of your own citizens to second-class status, but you also abrogated to yourself the right to demote overseas citizens visiting or residing here, who are legally married in their own countries, to that same second-class status, along with their children, which clearly over-reaches your jurisdiction, and is an interference in the domestic affairs of other sovereign states. This is arrogance of a high order.

Your dry recital of the legal niceties involved in this insult does not even begin to address the issues involved, and contributes nothing to remedying the current situation.

Yours,



Doug Pollard