Mothership Blog

In case you thought I was referring to a coveted Pink Award, the title is  just a pun on the year’s end! Hope the rest won’t disappoint, however, as I want to firm up a few highlights of 2010.

Let me start with the recent news that the US Senate has finally given approval for openly gay men and women to serve in the military ( something the UK allowed ten years ago) - another small but significant step for gay rights, even if it’s for the wrong reasons. One elderly Senator spoke of a gay soldier he knew, saying: “He’s big, and he’s mean, and he kills lots of bad guys”, as if that was the test of all gay people had to offer.

Nearer home, as a former student of the London School of Economics, I’m reminded of this year being the 40th anniversary of the first gathering of the Gay Liberation Front there on 13 October, 1970. It was also the year we wore badges declaring, Gay Is Good, an echo of black being beautiful, which was  bright, bold, and concise. There have been many reasons this year why I think that slogan holds good. Read the rest of this entry »

Mae West

When Mae West famously quipped, “a hard man is good to find”, she could not have envisaged the extent of the modern gay movement’s reliance on porn from mags to movies to the proliferation of domestic cam sites. She was a truly modern woman whose sexual awareness,  electrifying satire,  and forthright feminism were castigated by the moral majority in 1920s America.

Imprisoned on Devil’s Island for “corrupting the morals of youth”, Mae saw enough homosexuality to turn it into a play called The Drag. It was promptly dropped when she refused to rewrite it to please a nervous theatre manager.

For all her renown, she would have seen the gay porn now surfeiting the scene as pernicious. It is a revelation to look at her career again, which, she claimed, had “a redeeming social purpose”, and, in the light of this, to question where our present gay sexual obsessions are leading us. Read the rest of this entry »

Male equivalents of Agony Aunts for gay men are hard to find. The nearest we come to them is in the odd newspaper column, or gay fashion and lifestyle mags offering reassurance on health matters. Troubled teens and hesitant, closeted guys,  lacking a sensible gay friend and mentor, may want to turn to such a service.

The question being posed was put to Bet Lynch by Liz Mcdonald in a camp episode of Coronation Street. It’s always appealed to me as a funny exchange, most likely penned by a gay scriptwriter. Bet’s winning reply was:

“Well, if it does cock, I’m in ‘t bargain bucket wi’ yer.”

So here’s a gay Agony Uncle’s attempt to answer to an imaginary young crewmember’s dilemma. Read the rest of this entry »

Tattooed bad boy

As a gay man I’ve always been visually attracted to guys who might be termed the rough, the bad, and the thugly. Cinema and tv baddies, as long as they physically appealed, held my attention. Fairground guys who rode the Whip, collecting the money, tattooed heavies who lurked on street corners, teenage rebels and bad boys who sailed close to forbidden winds, sexually and emotionally transfixed me, whilst I wanted no part of their suspect and possibly violent lives.

Looking back, they’ve travelled with me, these denizens of darker subcultures, and I still crave for dominant, rougher types, though the kind who look out for me as well. So many times, when a killer or high ranking criminal has been pictured in the papers or the evening news, I’ve thought them fanciable, with a pang of guilt remembering the reality of what they had done to their victims. Read the rest of this entry »

Keep an open mind and an open heart

A friend complained the other day about just how frustrating gay dating can be.  He remarked on the difficulty of building up a dialogue, with gay guys feeding scraps of information about themselves, or simply not replying to messages at all. We all experience similar problems of communication, so I asked myself what is going wrong? It should be easy; we’re all hungry for sex, friendship, or love, in different ways, but I believe a certain attitude of mind may be wanting: a constant state of awareness of sexual possibilities.

Ever noticed those quaint old book titles, published in all innocence, which can now seem funny, and laced with innuendo? I came across one called, A Book of Blank Maps, and immediately thought it would make an appropriate christening gift for future gay men and lesbians. Finding our bearings as we grow up in straight society is like having such a guide, and the dating game can be like an assault course for the emotions without a grid reference in sight. Use of the imagination is one vital part of the equipment we need. Read the rest of this entry »