personal political

launch

This week was the 30th anniversary of the original Mardi Gras and on that night I went to the launch (by Sydney Mayor Clover Moore) of a small book of oral history of the first years of the Mardi Gras.

These sorts of events are strange ones for me and probably for most of the others who were there. Here we are, a bunch of middle aged grey-haired people harking back to a street-fighting time which has become fixed in legend - but the reality of that time isn't an easy thing to convey. I was pleased that most of the speakers directly addressed not only the 'diversity' of the Mardi Gras participants, but the overt conflicts and tensions that ran through what was a highly politicised movement.

mardi gras writing

Some new e-publications have been released for Mardi Gras: free downloadable pdfs that can be either read on-screen or printed out.

First is Justified & Ancient, a  retrospective of Oz gay male writing from the late 1970s featuring work by William Yang (then known as photographer and poet Will Young), Dave Sargent [the first person I knew to die of AIDS, though we didn't know then what it was], Barry Lowe, Ian MacNeill and Gary Dunne.

Second is a pdf of the winning and highly commended entries in this year’s Mardi Gras Short Story Competition which were announced and read at Will & Toby's above Taylor Square in Darlinghurst last Tuesday night. The seven 500-word pieces from across the broad GLBTQ spectrum include Siobhan Colman's first prize winner, Sweet Treats.

hens

As part of my GloBloPoMo, I decided to look back through all my draft posts (of which there were two pages - I was surprised) and post some of them - so you get the work in progress and then my current thoughts on the subject.

Here's one I wrote two years ago!
******************************

We've been invited to another wedding.

daughter

The prime minister of Cambodia has a lesbian daughter and he's not happy about it.

a tale of two embryos

When I first heard that a legal case had started in which a lesbian couple were suing their IVF doctor for transferring two embryos instead of one, resulting in twins, my heart sank. Apparently this case dominated talkback radio on Wednesday, then on Thursday the usual rightwing commentators ranted against it in the press. Last night, however, the women argued back and today there are some more measured comments appearing.

I find cases like this quite confronting - my immediate response was that I'd have loved to be in their situation and ended up with two children. That I was unable too have a second child is an underlying source of sadness for me. But the more I think about it and the more I post on the discussion about it over at LP, the more I have to accept that I'm not them - it's a straightforward claim of medical mispractice, nothing to do with me or any of the outraged moralists who are filling the airwaves.

(not) everybody loves good neighbours

Cross posted at Larvatus Prodeo

I read yesterday that one quarter of Australians (or, to be more accurate, one quarter of those surveyed in the Human Beliefs and Values Survey) said they wouldn’t want gay neighbours, according to Love Thy Neighbour: How Much Bigotry is there is Western Countries, a paper interpreting the survey statistics by Brisbane economist John Mangan.

His co-author was Professor Vani Borooah of the University of Ulster - an interesting little irony as the northern Irish topped the list of bigots, with 36 percent not wanting to live next door to homos and 19 percent thinking immigrants and foreign workers weren’t desirable neighbours either.

Now, there are statistics, lies, etcetera, etcetera, and I haven’t read the paper. But as one of the apparently undesirable, I find these results intriguing. It never would have occurred to me that so many of my countrypeople would not want to live next door to me. What intrigues and baffles me is exactly what they think would be the problem.

out and not out

"He was born gay", a boy wearing a cross on a chain around his neck was saying as I walked into the tutorial room. The tutor hadn't arrived yet so the conversation across the room between a group of girls (some wearing headscarves) and two Christian boys, continued for awhile.

"Everyone knew Anthony was gay" said one girl. "Yeah, Anthony was probably born gay."

They had a copy of the Daily Telegraph open on the spread about Callea coming out. I looked across at one of the Christian boys who I'm sure is also gay but probably not out to himself or anyone else - his face looked uncomfortable, confused. Yeah, he's gay.

Meanwhile, I've probably missed my own chance to come out to a woman who I've taken to chatting with after another tute.

parade

We walked in the Mardi Gras parade last weekend, dressed in black and white as part of the Happy Feet, happy families group.

Mardi Gras is a strange event.

I was around for the original 1978 'riots' which gave birth to Mardi Gras, but not long afterward, I moved to England and stayed for many years. When I returned to Sydney in the 90s, Mardi Gras had been turned into a massive, organised and commercialised event - a spectacle. There were crowd barriers along the route, so it wasn't even like a Latin American mardi gras or like London's Notting Hill music festival, with people dancing in the street. There was a clear demarcation between parade and spectators, many - if not most - of whom are straight. You had to grab a posse as early as possible from which to watch the parade. After the parade came the party, an all-nighter, which was fun but felt slightly disconnected from the parade - it felt like the elite, inner sanctum (though not all that elite, given that thousands of people attend. I guess the 'eliteness' came from it being predominantly gay, as opposed to the parade audience.)

I found this hybrid event really odd. Not a demonstration or protest march, not a street dance open to all, like the Notting Hill festival in London. I didn't much like it.

marriage and d-i-v-o-r-c-e

They've split up.

When I first heard the news, my main reaction was surprise. I'd genuinely thought they were stayers, totally devoted to each other.

My second and third reactions concerned the detail of how our future relationships are to be negotiated.

Fourth reaction: this just confirms how ludicrous "getting married" is, as far as I'm concerned. (I'm writing as someone who just marked the 19th anniversary of being together with co-parent. We don't see ourselves as married.) And as a friend remarked, when I told her the news, as with a lot of longterm heterosexual couples who marry only to split up not long after, it makes you wonder if there was a problem just beneath the surface that one or both partners was trying to squash down with a marriage declaration. Clearly, that didn't work.

Thank goodness they kept the ceremony short and sweet and cheap.

alice and tracy

Am I the last to find out that Alice Walker and Tracy Chapman had an affair?