Project Kronos by Hasraf HaZ Dulull

ABE by Rob McLellan

Surrender by Will Haughery

The Golem - Black Francis by The Bureau Records

THE END by PROSPEKT

Apparently this charming scene incited me to violence. What?

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Tambourine by Allen Laseter

The Ring Cycle

Oh the gays, flaunting their perverted life-stylings in our faces. They just can’t help it, can they? The forced wedding pictures, the catalog kids (please, not the children!), the doggie-love! Oh God, the dogs. Cease and desist. This lifestyle choice (as well as your bad taste in art and couches) will bring down destruction upon us all. What a world. What a litany of errors. How the fuck did we get here? What about the traditions? The Old Rites and Rituals? These radicals turn their backs on their forefathers casting their lot with the Hetero-Imperium. Not a shot fired breaching our sturdy battlements. And for what? A slice of white cake. For shame.

No, but seriously, folks. Marriage, what a clever trap to set if one wanted to mislead a beleaguered lot. Today, tradgemony is presented as the sole goal of the “hetero-gay rights movement”, but it’s not just a sunny march toward political rights, nor a happy trod up the altar, it’s about a choice of a way of life that is privileged over others. Beneath the shallow political currents there are deeper cultural and existential tides that drive this movement. The stealthy religiosity of this cult of love and marriage is ignored, as the drunken ox (the ever foolish gays) tilts toward the altar of sacrifice, purification and elimination. (And no, we have nothing against cults per se: they’re a great way to make easy money and, hell, we’re in one ourselves, but this one icks us out.) It didn’t have to be this way, kids.

The roots of the Gay Marriage Cult are perfidious (and at the same time, humanly understandable). In the midst of the Plague in the early ’90s (see How To Survive A Plague, boys, it’ll fill you in on Daddy’s exciting and well-spent youth), Larry Kramer and Andrew Sullivan (1), self-cast in this Grand Guignol as Moses (with a dash of Lot) and Jesus, respectively, decided enough was enough: Sodom and Gomorrah must be destroyed—- the Bathhouses, tea rooms and dirty bars (where both of them had spent so much time researching) and the life-style practiced there, was, a very, very bad place: the rectum, in fact, did lead inexorably to the grave and it needed to be closed, for good. In some ways they had a point: there were occasional Dionysian excesses. In most ways they were wrong about that culture, but it didn’t much matter. It was a case of gay sex panic. The old gay ghetto was already in free-fall at the time and has now all but disappeared. A very effective ally to reaction was quietly looming in the background, HIV/AIDS; no one was about to argue with It at the time. (Yes, that’s right, kids, it WAS like Moby Dick and Ahab teaming up.)

These two former party boys and their ilk (Judas played by Michelangelo Signorile) decided that the gays must flee the burning cities of Sodom (the West Village, Marais and Castro) and seek the promised land: Heteroville! They would suffer on a long journey that in the end the survivors would be rewarded with homes and husbands and children (and 72 nubile youth?). A nice fairy story, just like they have in the Children’s Bible and Torah, but in the end, crazy talk. The mess and madness (read: gay life as lived by them) would stop and there would be a happily ever after for all. (See Virtually Normal by Sullivan, but take the antidote soon after, The Trouble With Normal by Michael Warner, lest you turn a gaybot-zombie). Since everyone with any authority was tied up at the time (that is, dead, dying or tending the dead) this tired retreaded redemption story passed the rump parliament of Rainbowland. (Of course the Lesbian Assembly cheered.) We will be redeemed, etc. Much of what this unelected Triumvirate (cue Star Wars “Empire” theme) said at the time had more to do with their contending Messiah complexes, ageing male syndromes, sodden in pseudo-/religious guilt, but to be fair to those who listened, there was a sincere wish to start anew somewhere.

Gay men back then did their fair share of fantasising about better days: to be safe and sound, even in the suburbs, floating on an island of consumer goods with a cute hubby was an understandable daydream in the midst of an apocalyptic conflagration. It certainly beat the reality of tending friends who were dying horribly on gurneys in public hospitals. And the odd thing is, the “we just wanna be normal…just like you” thing worked. Ah, but answered prayers.

Cut to: us, holding tea roses at a wedding of people we don’t want to know thinking these thoughts above. (A Boston terrier as a bridesmaid, really, queens? Really?) And we want to spit this acid out or at the very least to leave, but these two porn stars on the altar look so dumb-happy and the drinks are free.

There’s just nothing to do. And yet.

One is stuck, you see? The evil genius of the tender trap. Queen to Queen, check and mate. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t…ok, too much champers. Talk about the Ring! Marriage is the keystone of so many other retrograde structures, but if you buy into it, you’re really IN. Alternatives? Glad you asked. What about no privileging one form of relationship over all the other ways of being together (or alone)? People won’t reproduce? Provide a baby-bounty and time off to raise them and they would anyway. (Like not enough children is the world’s biggest problem!) BUT, there IS hope, even for the gays: yes, here come the divorces, but that’s secondary. The (Bareback) Trojan Horse Thesis, yes if those crazy gays can get inside the walls of the Heteroville, even to their sanctum santorum, you can rely on them to fuck up the very DNA of straightness. A mainline into the Heart of Whiteness. It’s a slim, Fantastic Journey kind of hope, but in these Dark Times, you gotta have hope (or heroin). In the meantime, can we please start using our creativity in our lives and not just as art directors and handmaidens of capitalism. You know what we mean, already in fifth grade teacher your teacher, Mrs Myers said in her grade report, “he has such a flare…”, come into the chiaroscuro of the closet and light it up, men. Rise in darkness.

(1) O Homos: you are required to spit in an unison and hygienic manner when these names are uttered, so go on, let it rip).

Protecting and Maintaining Your Heterosexual House of Cards by Kirby Ferguson

Hey Ben. Dinner's ready.

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I'm the first one with the new She-Town sticker!

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frank ocean [lost] by christopher francis ocean

Rudimental - Waiting All Night feat. Ella Eyre by SureShot

Family of the Year // "Hero" (Dir. Isaac Rentz) by More Media

The Circle Line by Adam Wells

Want!

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EVERY QUESTION ANSWERED

All I have of you is your body and the stories you tell. I don’t see what you keep by your bedside, the books you read, the moisturisers you use. I don’t see what you look like in the mornings – are you grumpy? – what you smell like after a night’s sleep, even those nights when you haven’t been making love. I don’t hear you eat breakfast or see the table you sit at, or the way the light comes into the room if it’s not too early and you don’t get up before sunrise. Do you listen to the radio in the morning, play music when you get ready for work? I can’t tell if you live on your own. I don’t see what you wear to work, don’t know how you get there. Are you the kind of person who cycles in? Do you work behind a desk, in an office, on the railways? Who’s there to greet you when you get in to work? I can’t tell how often you visit your family, or if your parents are alive. Are you close to your mother? Too close? I don’t hear what she calls you, or what they call you at work. Tell me your nicknames, every term of endearment, every name you’ve been called from crib to college – did you go to college? – and what you lovers have called you, other men you’ve been intimate with, men who’ve known things about you. I can’t taste the food you like, the pastries you order with your coffee, or do you prefer tea and a scone? Do you bite your nails? Do you check and recheck things are switched off, the gas, the boiler, the lights, before you leave the house? I can’t tell where you go on holiday, what you look like in a swim suit, or a suit, what you like to dress up as when you get invited to fancy-dress parties. I can’t smell what you cook, what you feed your friends when they come for dinner. I can’t see what kinds of friends you have – are they women, mainly straight? Do you play sports? You look like you might be one of those guys who plays five-a-side football every Saturday with his friends. Do you call them “mates”? Do you go to church? Are you circumcised for a reason? Will you be doing stuff for Easter? Do you like chocolate? I can’t tell what presents you like, what your favourite flower is, favourite colour, bar, shoe, deli, fruit, chocolate? I can’t tell how you walk into a room, but if it’s anything like what I saw when you walked in here, you’re a confident guy. I don’t know what kind of insecurities you have, how you feel about an audience, what you talk about when you talk to a room of people. I’ve not heard you shout, I can’t tell what you look like when you’re angry or frustrated or want to stop someone from doing something stupid. I can’t tell what you carry in your bag, whether you have good-luck charms or family heirlooms, thing passed down, inherited. I can’t see the stamps in your passport, don’t know where you’ve been. Do you snore? Do you drink? What kind of a teenager were you? What do people say when they’re asked to describe you? How do they feel when you walk into the room? I can’t tell what kind of shoes you wear, what underwear you wear, nor if you keep your laundry basket in the bathroom or the bedroom. Is your house big enough for a laundry room? I don’t know where you live or where you were born. You could be from Colombia or Spain or the Philippines. I fucked a guy once from Mongolia who looked exactly like you. I can’t see you collections or if you have a collection, if you’re the stamp-collecting type, the coaster type, the type who keeps match boxes from every bar, café and restaurant you’ve been to. Did you smoke in the past? What drugs have you taken? So many men here are on one drug or another, especially the younger ones, though I know someone who likes them like that, skinny and strung out, tweaking twinks who’ll do pretty much anything you’re into. I can’t tell what sort of men you go for. When you get your hair cut, do you prefer a barber or a hairdresser? Do you like sitting in a chair while someone cooks for you, cuts your hair, fills your teeth? Tell me what kind of pain you like and how far I can go. Tell me if you’ve been tied up. I can’t tell what kind of school you went to, if you’re the type who likes to be smacked, who likes to be reminded of his school days. And in the evenings when you get home, do you watch television. I can’t tell if you’d cook for yourself or order a takeway, or stop off at Waitrose on your way home and buy a ready meal, one of those meal deals that comes with a bottle of wine. Do you drink the whole bottle at the end of a day’s work? And then when you’ve drunk it and you’re still buzzing, still coming down from something or other that happened at work and is nagging at you, do you land up coming to places like this? And now that you’re here and we’re doing what we’re doing, because any moment now we’re about to come and I really like you and maybe we could swap numbers, maybe we could meet up again, see if there’s more to this chemistry that just sex, if we let everything that can unfold from this moment unfold, if we went further than this room, stepped out into the world, took the risk of finding out the answers to every question one person might want to ask another human being.

Good stuff.

The elaborate end of Robert Ebb by Robert Ebb

The Outs Chanukah Special by The Outs

Hip Talk by J. Sprig

MOTHERLAND | Mutterland by Hannes Appell