Madness, Sadness & Happiness

At sixteen, the first encounter of passion has the deadly force of a hurricane. In to the confused vortex you go, along with the whirling, spinning, heady emotions of obsession, infatuation, sexual preoccupation, what you think is love and common sense.

That first informative experience has no predecessor - there is no previous life lesson to draw from. Without rules or expectation, "first love" can segue into the realm of fantasy. Because we know so little about the construct of a relationship or it's mundanities, we allow it licence to stray into a Mills & Boon, Barbara Cartland fancy that can sadly bear only a slight resemblance to the nuts and bolts of it all.

I was sixteen when I met a man, very nearly double my age, called Clive, and developed a frighteningly intense infatuation for him. In retrospect I saw it as falling in love, but to do that demands reciprocity and an altruism of spirit. My feelings at the time, were, not surprisingly, that of a boy - selfishly immature. I met Clive whilst I was on holiday with my parents in Dorset, and I went off by myself to Sandbanks. A Bacchanalian Orgy of gay sex in sand dunes on a naturist beach. I can only say I was goggle eyed when I got there, and felt like a million dollars by the time I left. It was certainly my rite of passage.

Clive and I met again while I was still on holiday several times, he had some crumbly old vintage car and we trundled around visiting different beaches and places like Corfe Castle, which, combined with the sublime Dorset landscape and the beautiful weather, is a period of my life that will always remain vividly tinted and beautiful. However, in a way, our time together was a holiday romance. My mistake was thinking it was a relationship. I'll never regret leaving home at 16 and living with Clive in Southampton, because I would be writing a very different story, but holiday romances are always a bad premise for a relationship. Especially ones you conduct abroad. It's hard to find Greek Tavernas in Smethwick, and I don't think there are many decent beaches there either.

When we returned home, my parents had become aware of my new "gay" status. I told them while I was on holiday, which went down like a lead balloon. My parents evolution regarding the acceptance of my sexuality has been long and interesting. I've never sought to push my sexuality at them, but there have been times where my gay status has almost broke our family apart.

The only thing on my mind back in Shropshire, to the detriment of everything and everyone else was Clive, Clive, Clive. I know now it was nauseating. We had a telephone box at the top of our drive, and I spent most of the time in there, proclaiming my undying love for him, as I didn't want my parents to hear me proclaiming my undying love for him on our house phone. When I wasn't doing that, I literally spent hours gazing out of my bedroom window into the middle distance, with a forlorn expression on my face. This was BBC Jane Austen adaptation standard maudlin. Oh, and I did a lot of self-conscious weeping, with the bedroom door open, ensuring everyone else could hear my angst and distress.

Looking back, I can see that I told Clive I was moving down there. I don't think there was much discussion. He certainly didn't resist, and he seemed keen. I think my parents were so utterly confounded by my am-dram rapid-cycling bi-polar moods, that tilted on a simple premise of whether Clive picked the phone up or not, added to what was frankly a deeply oppressive atmosphere in the house. My brother had suddenly become Charles Bronson (not the actor, the one in prison), acting ultra-hetero, anti-gay, who frankly made my life miserable (sorry Jason but it's true - I know you love me now, and all is forgiven), and my dad was behaving rather strangely, saying odd things like my handwriting was girlish or effeminate or something like that - obviously everyone was in a bit of a palaver. My decision to go was made easier by the day.

One has to look at coming out not as a 16 year old in 2013, where attitudes are are for the majority 180 degrees switched, but from 1990, 23 years ago, when I came out. The stigma around AIDS had pushed back gay acceptance ten years, we had a government pushing through Clause 28. I think my parents were fearful. I think my mother in particular was worried for the prejudice I might encounter and the obstacles it might put in my way. With hindsight, although her fears were unfounded, I understand them.

I did encounter many problems, but ironically, these came far more from the gay scene itself and from the relationships I had. I have never once received any hostility for my sexuality.

But the day came, on the 1st of September 1990 when I left my parents, never to go back. Just as the happiness of that time in Dorset is a vivid to me now as it was then, so was the awful sadness and loneliness I felt on the day I left, and for weeks after, and those days too are burnished into my memory. But they were the beginning of a new adventure, that would see me go to many incredible places and meet some truly amazing people.

A Time Bomb In The Gay Community

In 2008 I decided, after a period of singledom, and following a short, interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful relationship that I would poke my nose over the parapet and look for a new boyfriend.

I was living in Doncaster at the time. I have to be ruthlessly honest about the place. It is a ditch. It also has a problem. Because it is so awful people don't stick around if they can help it. People with brains, talent or creativity leave for more promising lands. There were several reasons I stuck it out as long as I did - some good, some not so good, but I called it The Armpit Of England, and the one and only gay pub was the nasty boil right in the middle of it.

I did try twice to meet Mr. Right in that gay pub. To my credit, I didn't seem to have problems attracting suitors, it's just they were either a) hideous b) alcoholic c) conversationally limited to discussing Girls Aloud and/or Jordan d) bisexual (read: married) e) excruciatingly camp, in a non-natural way. The same people abounded when I went the one and only time to Doncaster Gay Pride, which was so soul destroying I actually wept when I got home. It was every gay and lesbian tired old cliche rolled into a carnival of gone-off beer drinking - simpering Nellies dancing around their man-bags and butch dykes grimacing with cigarettes clenched between their teeth. It was like fun without the fun.

So in my tentative scan of possible love on the horizon, I turned once more to Gaydar, which wasn't exactly "fresh" at that point either. But because I hadn't been on it for so long, and once I reactivated my profile, I started to get messages. Gaydar is quite explicit in listing people's preferences. One of them is a displayed preference informing the viewer of another person's profile whether the profile's owner prefers safe sex or unprotected. I vividly recall the first time I checked my messages and I had around fifteen unique respondents. All but one said they preferred unprotected sex.

This came as an enormous shock to me. The last time I had used Gaydar had only been a few years prior, and it was far, far more common to see on people's profiles that they were listed as preferring "safe sex". Something had changed.

This is why it came as no shock to me to read today that the number of men choosing to have unprotected sex with other men rose 26% between 1990 and 2010, according to the Health Protection Agency and University College London.

The terrifying cull of thousands of gay men that occurred in New York, San Francisco and London in the early 1980's, when AIDS wasn't even called that - it was called GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) and the ravaging effects it meted out on the bodies of previously fit, virile young men were utterly devastating. I'm old enough to remember those images, even though I was a young boy. The bravery of those ill men who were willing guinea pigs - who ingested, there is no other word, poisons, in the hope that the either cure or retardation of the progression of HIV into AIDS could be brought about. It was because of those gay men that knew they had no hope, but gave what little of their life they had left to further research into the very first effective drug therapy that slowed the evolution of HIV.

If we fast forward into the era when combination therapy began, this is when HIV was no longer viewed as a terminal condition. It became a chronic condition. But this is not to say that people do not die from HIV/AIDS. Some never find a combination that works. Men who have been reinfected several times can develop super strains that are immune to all combination therapies, and their prognosis is poor. This is what is so frightening in these statistics. It seems hard to compute, but many men have sought out HIV positive men, "Bugchasing", in the erroneous belief that if they are HIV positive they will receive the entire suite of disability benefits. Things are very different now. Unless you are ill from HIV, or your blood counts have pushed you into AIDS, you are deemed fit for work. Yet this practice is quite widespread. It seems an awful indictment on an individual's lack of self esteem to wantonly give themselves a lifelong chronic, potentially life-threatening illness.

What is important to note here is the word "choose". This isn't about forgetting to wear a condom in a drunken stupor, or after a night clubbing when you've both had Ecstasy and you're not thinking clearly. It's an informed choice, and that's why it's so worrying - over a quarter of gay men are choosing to have unsafe sex.

What this tells us is there is no fear around HIV/AIDS. That it is seen as something you simply pop a pill for, and you just get on with your life. But, as someone who's partner is HIV positive I know this is not the reality. Because people are not factoring the massive side effects from the medication which leave you exhausted, that cause you to gain weight, and the real symptoms - the constant colds, the immune system that's completely dependent on you remembering to take medication like clockwork on the dot X amounts of time every day. And the worst thing is the fear. Maybe my partner doesn't worry as much as me, but I'm constantly worrying that he is ok, that he's going to be ok. Maybe he worries more than me.

There is nothing to be gained by regressing to the scare tactic adverts of the 1980's - but the male gay scene needs shaking, because it's sleep walking into a catastrophe. They have forgotten that there are absolutely no guarantees as far as medication is concerned. And the more unprotected sex they have, and should an individual get reinfected and reinfected his chances of successful treatment recede dramatically each time.

We should all be allowed to live the lives we choose, but I think of those men in 1982 and 1983 who had no hope, and died in abject agony whilst a pioneering and tiny group of scientists and chemists dosed and injected them with the most awful drugs - the prototypes of the combination therapies that keep all those who have access to HIV drugs alive today. Part of me feels that we, as a gay community owe it to those men to contemplate why these drugs came to be - for what purpose. I think we could all benefit from reflecting on their true value, and more importantly on how we value ourselves as living breathing humans, partaking and interacting in this complex world.

The Lonely Echo Of Bindel's Voice

There may be just one theme that Julie Bindel and myself agree on, and that is gay men and lesbians have often made for a rather unholy alliance. The only glue holding these two diametrically opposed forces together being the "gay" epithet, and the shared experiences of coming out to family, friends and work colleagues. In every other respect we can be allowed to celebrate the fact that as gay men and gay women, we really are chalk and cheese.

Julie, it seems, has struggled for much of her life to get along with most anyone at all. She gave voice some time ago in a Guardian article, "It's not me, it's you", at her distaste at being dumped together with bisexuals, intersex, and, ironically, she genuinely seemed confused when she was rebuffed by the transgender community. This is hardly surprising after writing an excoriating attack on the transgender community, "Gender Benders Beware", in which she denied the difficulties and stigma faced by transgender people in the worst possible terms - in fact she decided to get the Transphobic-Cheerleading Pompoms out herself. She saw fit to treat this section of our community as fodder for ridicule and denigration. After all her bullying, not only towards the Transgender Community, but in frankly absurd and risible articles & interviews she accused the Gay Male community of wholesale misogyny - weirdly with no empirical evidence to back up this nonsense, the LGBT community were starting to snap at Ms. Bindel's ankles.

This caused her to her to go her room in a jolly old huff and pen, "It's not me, it's you" for The Guardian. The upshot of this article was that poor spoilt Julie had been ostracised because the LGBT community were sick to the back teeth of her transphobia and misandry, so Julie was going to throw all of her toys out her pram and go and play on her own. Suffice it to say, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief when she did.

Julie is what I'd call a Dino-Feminist - ideologically speaking; a carnivorous, male-gobbling beast, with forward facing, myopic eyes, unable to see the full horizon, but with a pathological, rather crazed scent for blood, and a herd mentality which includes other like minded Dino-Feminist lesbians only. Her coterie includes other misandrists, such as Gail Dines, Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill, the subject of my last blog.

Some girls of Bindel's age would have had posters all over their bedroom walls of the Bay City Rollers or the Nolans, I fear Julie's walls would have been covered with pictures of saucy images of the feminist to eat all feminists - Andrea Dworkin, probably provocatively posing with a copy of Women Hating: A Radical Look At Pornography.

Julie's feminist ideals are really quite simple to grasp, which makes one question why they're so simple to grasp. Is it because she couldn't come up with anything more sophisticated, a là Camille Paglia, who really was twenty years ahead of her time in understanding New Feminism, and making it workable for women in the 21st century? After all, not all women want to wear sandals made out of bean sprouts, polo-necked, long-sleeve jumpers fashioned from biodegradable camel dung, knitted by a women's collective and fair trade corduroy slacks dyed with elderberry juice. No, Julie's mandate is this: hate and despise everyone apart from radical lesbian feminists. Simple! You could become a journalist with a mandate like that! Think of all the nasty, emetic, muck raking, bile-filled columns you could write! And this is exactly what Julie did.

For what seems like centuries, Julie has been an ardent man-hater of the first order, conveniently forgetting that if it wasn't for a man, she wouldn't be here in the first place. Articles entitled "Why I Hate Men", suggest more than dispassionate analysis, and point to a worrying, compulsive behavioural malfunction. Julie, the rebel, likes to write inflammatory pieces for The Guardian - which seems for some perverse reason to allow puritanical bigots such as Bindel to publish articles stuffed to busting with misandry, hatred towards other women who don't get her brand of misanthropic feminism, and other venom filled toxic rubbish.

As such a notorious name on the political lesbian political scene, she endangers all others in that field who are reasoned and non-reactionary with the risk of being tarred with Bindel's taint of fanatical brainwashed extremism. Here's a little extract from "Why I Hate Men", just for us boys, to cheer us up a bit:

"Before the misogynists start ranting on about how many men are abused by women, how many women kill their children, etc, etc, don't bother. Every piece of credible research produced in every country in the world where this work has been done shows that sexual and domestic violence is committed overwhelmingly by men against females. The men who regularly get very offended on this blog, protesting that they have never hurt a fly, probably do not do an awful lot to stop other men harming women. Where are men's voices of protest in this war against women? When can we expect your support in reducing numbers of females killed and raped by men? I will not be holding my breath, but in the meantime, I will say loud and proud, yes, today I hate men, and will tomorrow and the day after. But only the men who perpetrate these crimes against my sisters, and those who do nothing to stop it. Are you in either one of those categories? If so, then I despise you."

I left a response to this in the comments section, but of course it would have fell on deaf ears. I said that no one had screwed up my life like my birth mother had, due to her neglect and abuse prior to my adoptive parents taking me in. No man had caused anywhere near the kind of damage that had lasted until I started receiving psychoanalysis. But as you can see from the above, Ms. Bindel doesn't give a shit. She's only interested in her one woman freak show feminist agenda, not humanity, not small babies, as I was, who are totally defenceless. She's just interested in Radical Feminist Lesbians. She's a caring soul, isn't she, our Julie?

But, wait... It gets, well, worse. Very recently our Oracle, our Esteemed Julie of The Mighty Vadge took to Twitter and merrily tweeted away. But I ought to give a bit of a back story. Julie claims to be a champion for women who have suffered at the hands of men. She has helped women find safety in refuge centres. So she's not all bad. Or so it would seem. But her kindness is highly conditional if this tweet is anything to go by:

"Those women that proclaim “I’m not a feminist” should be paid less than men, have no maternity benefits, no access to refuges, and no vote"

Read another way, any woman that did not proclaim before her that she were not a feminist would not receive her help if her life were in mortal danger at the hands of a murderous partner - that she would turn her back on someone in an incredibly needy and vulnerable situation, simply because they did not agree with her ideologies. I assume by that she'd turn away prostitutes because they wouldn't fit into Julie's scheme, or a young seventeen year old that didn't understand what feminism was - or more accurately and pertinently, what Julie Bindel's kind of feminism was.

I'll leave it up to you to make up your mind about the rest of that tweet, but I know what I think of it. What it says to me is there stands a woman so consumed by her own grandiosity of thought, a woman so deviated from the path of simple humanity by the iron rod of feminism for feminism's sake, that she has forfeited her own conscience and empathy in exchange for a fascistic empty and worthless set of ideals. Ideals which she has used to barter the value of other women's safety and value against the currency of a devotional obsession to feminism - which, clearly, to Julie Bindel, is nothing more than a word: F-E-M-I-N-I-S-M.

In that one tweet she has betrayed womankind in one fell swoop. I'm not a woman, but if I were, my response to that tweet would be, "shove it up your tofu-filled arsehole, Julie".

Because Miss Bindel belongs in Dworkinland, a bit like that place where the Teletubbies live, you know, not real life, because the strategies she has for living are so far out there, she really is on the next planet and can wave to Po and La-La - the feminism she tries to sublimate onto other women simply bounces off. Women don't want to live like Julie Bindel. They want to be free, not miserable, with their noses stuffed in their belly buttons, raging with anger towards other men, other women - exploding with misanthropy. That's exactly why Camille Paglia was so ahead of her time, because she realised that women liked to have fun with their sexuality, with their bodies. They didn't want to be like Julie - registering all the passion of a parking meter and the sexual allure of a body bag. Paglia saw that in women that they didn't have to be commodities for men by dressing how they wanted to - they could dress for themselves, to make themselves feel great, and still be a feminist.

But like everything she does Bindel has to go too far. Whether it's offending others, or sticking to her feminorexia-nervosa. In doing this, Bindel has become a very weird anachronism, a not-so-quaint relic - a voice that has, curiously, become a little like Julie Burchill's. Antiquated, irrelevant and something no woman I know of today, in 2013, can relate to in any shape or form. Her radicalism has turned into hate speech, akin to Burchill's - perhaps that's why they get along. With Gail Dines, another utter irrelevance of the 21st century, they form an Unholy Trinity of Neo-Mary Whitehouse Gorgons - Thou Shalt Not Watch Pornography, Thou Shalt Not Show Thy Breast, Thou Shalt Not Lay With Both A Man And A Woman, Thou Shall Be Miserable All Thy Life, Thou Shall Only Be A Bloody Radical Bigoted Lesbian Feminist.

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It's Time Julie Burchill Put Down Her Pen

Julie Burchill has been oddly quiet this week. Or maybe not so odd, after the gigantic backlash witnessed in the wake of her recent Observer piece, which has been received with wholesale revulsion. This time, Julie went way too far. Her targets this time were perhaps one of the most misunderstood, marginalised and vulnerable people in our society - the Transgender community. The entire article can be found here (it was taken off the Guardian website, where it had originally appeared, along with the Observer newspaper, but the Guardian removed the article after widespread complaint. Ms. Burchill then happily gave her permission for this pile of stinking prose to be reprinted in the right-wing press):

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100198116/here-is-julie-burchills-censored-observer-article/

Some of her more offending remarks include referring to transgender women as a "bunch of dicks in chicks clothing", "screaming mimis", and "a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs", amongst other disgusting stuff. All of this was embedded in a manure of bigotry and prejudice that had seemingly been rotting away since the times of "Love Thy Neighbour" and a Bernard Manning T.V Special.

The whiplash from this event was swift and sharp. The Guardian received hundreds and hundreds of complaints in their comments section, and over 200 emails. In a contrite appraisal of events, the Guardian editor acknowledged that many of the complaints had not emanated from the Transgender community, but from others, who were astounded that the article had been passed as editorially safe, and had so clearly broken the Guardian's own journalistic editorial code. There was a sense from many that if the article had been written about disabled, black or gay people it would never have been printed. The editor apologised in no uncertain terms, and conceded that a dire mistake had been made in allowing such a dreadful piece of bigoted commentary through.

In two paragraphs, Roz Kaveney so succinctly put into a nutshell everything that was so wrong, and so upsetting about Julie Burchill's article:

"Once you decide that some people's lives are not real, it becomes OK to abuse them; for people without the outlet of writing for a national newspaper, it becomes OK to shout things in the street, or worse. The trouble with Burchill's list of negative epithets for trans people is that she legitimises the basic currency of hate speech. Trans people are one of the very few minorities who some progressives feel entitled to mock and misrepresent – but then Burchill parted company with the left a long time ago. By now, she has parted company with common decency.

What I would ask Moore and Burchill is this: do you think that what you've written makes it more or less likely that an elderly trans woman living on a housing estate will get jostled on the stairs by her neighbours? Or that a teen trans man will be punched in the street? It's not anger-fuelled tweets, but that provocation, done with malice by people who should know better, that is the real bullying."

Whilst there is no doubt great damage was done by the editorial staff in letting Burchill's diatribe slip through the net, we see the real Modus Operandi of Burchill in her reaction to the Guardian removing her article - by her then giving permission for it to then be reprinted in the right-wing press. This is an act of revenge, of spite, and damn the consequences. Because the consequences won't affect Julie Burchill. As Roz Kaveney reminds us above, it will be the elderly transgender woman, or the young trans boy, trying to wrestle with the Dysphoria that so often comes before decision that will suffer at the hands of bigots, educated on the fodder of Burchill's monologues. This is dangerous stuff.

There was a time when Burchill could write her short snappy commentaries, always a bit shocking, but never cheap or brain dead. But more than one thing in Ms. Burchill has died. One of these things is her ability to use her nib as a scalpel - now she can not write without resorting to the lowest common denominator - the cheapest thrill, that horrible cheap perfume that makes you gip. Now she writes the equivalent of "I hate Tracey Drew", with a biro on those wooden school desks you got in the 70's.

The second thing that's died is her sense of time. She's still lost in Fleet Street. She even references it in her article, like some ageing demagogue with a weird kind of selective dementia, her stance and attitude is clearly the key that fits the lock of the Loadsa Money era, when bad jokes were good, and even better when they got printed in a newspaper - preferably the Red Tops, as she forever reminds us until we fall off our social club stools that she's a working class girl. She doesn't even notice how out of time she is. I can imagine her dating Alf Garnett - they would have a lot of common ground. If you imagine the article she wrote on the Transgender community being written in 1982, you wouldn't be shocked by it, and poor old Julie is probably wondering what all the fuss is about. She's probably got a mobile phone the size of a breeze block too.

On a serious note, what is heartening to see is the sheer might of the Transgender community and how interlinked they are. Julie Burchill doesn't stand a chance. Even more heartening are their supporters, the you and me's - and there are more of them than there are less of them. And this just goes to show just how out of touch that old Fleet Street hack Ms. Burchill really is. She should be writing period dramas, not ersatz commentaries, spewing bile on current affairs. Julie, for God's sake, put down your pen.

 

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