The Changing Room

At the moment I’m away from home and I’m going to two gyms. One is at a university and one is an old fashioned YMCA. The rules of the changing rooms fascinate me. Perhaps because I grew up a sissy I always visit masculinity as one visits a foreign land. I observe the customs, try to learn not to be offensive and quietly chuckle to myself at what seems funny. 

The university has a ‘recreation centre’. It is a kind of temple. You walk along a long corridor. On one side are offices for the trainers. On the walls opposite are framed jerseys of notable sports personalities. There is also a long - a very long - board which names various sportsmen and women of note. Not a name rings a bell with me.

I am heading to the weights room.

To myself I am beautifully incredulous. As a young sissy of twelve or thirteen nothing could have been more out-of-character. At grammar school, the weight room became a kind of heightened homo-erotic zone which I knew not to enter because it was enemy turf. (I would be called names, probably physically man-handled in a way which was somewhere between a brutal caress and a pummelling act of denigration.)

But today, as an aged mortal freed from so many obsessions, I brazenly walk into the weights room and begin my isoteric stretching exercises. Around me are a collection of what were once called ‘young bucks’.

These are young men in their early twenties. Their bodies can be sculptured to an ideal. They spend hours here, sharpening profiles, gazing at themselves not even covertly in the mirrors. Packs of young men help each other, admiring - never the physique of the young man lifting weights - but the prowess in the amount of weights that can be lifted. 

These are the young men, I think to myself, who are snatched away in wars. They are easily killed, come home, if lucky, wounded physically rather than psychologically. They have a simple splendour about them, an ease of movement, even vision.

In your early twenties, it probably appears straight forward. Or is it that the gym actually opens up one of the few uncomplicated testing grounds for young males?

But what fascinates me is the code of the dressing room. Of course as someone homosexual, I find the act of undressing in public among other males a coded  act. But here, at the university, nobody undresses in front of anyone. There is no nakedness, not even any near nakedness. In fact the accepted code is that you arrive at the gym dressed to exercise and you leave wearing the same clothes, only drenched in ennobling sweat.

What is unsaid here fascinates me.

I compare this with the YMCA where I also exercise. It is just down the road from where I am renting, so it has ease of access. The room is large, battered and not particularly clean. Compared to the almost unanimously trim young men at the university, there is a wide variety of body shapes and ages. Old suburban woman sit on rowing machines. There are Maori here who look like they have tough lives elsewhere: but here they sculpt, attain, and work to a definite principle. 

But it’s scuzzy. The television plays what seems like terminally 80s and 90s rock videos. Even the colour is faded. There are men with pot bellies. There are also extremely masculine men of a sort not found at the university gym. 

By this I mean men who wear their masculinity easily, but as a form of armour.

But what really fascinates me is the YMCA changing room. There are some lockers but by and large they are not used. The men come in, undress untidily and leave their pants, underpants and shoes in the sort of pile, by inference, a dutiful wife will pick up. Men also undress until they are completely naked. More than this, they stand around naked. 

The showers are a long run of nozzles in a completely open shoe-box space. There is no room for modesty, even false modesty. 

Hence in the changing room you see the ordinary damage of time on the male body. You see the usual range of penis-size. Some men glance at themselves in the tiny mirror square, to adjust their hair before leaving. But it is the changing room as an old fashioned male space.

My father who was born in 1910 and died twenty two years ago would have recognised it.

What fascinates me is the difference in codes. The YMCA changing room infers that nobody is homosexual. Everybody is assumed to be heterosexual, therefore there is no problem. At university, everybody, by contrast, is assumed to be homosexual. Everybody is assumed to be obsessed with watching, with ‘harassing’ by glance if not touch. Everyone refutes nakedness as an explosive idea - but one which, above all, must remain unspoken. There is a falseness to the modesty. An inhibition.

One - the old idea of communal nakedness - comes from a starkly homophobic time - but one which, ironically, allowed greater access to homosexual pleasures. The other, more acceptably ‘neutral’, seems to underline a kind of homosexual panic or fear. 

It doesn’t worry me. It doesn’t phase me. I’m not about to picket the recreation centre with a placard reading ‘I want to see more cocks!’ But it does amuse me: the changing rooms at the recreation centre are as tiny and covert as a lady chapel to the side of the great cathedral of narcissism, which is - the weights room - where male beauties sculpt themselves into doubles which they watch carefully in the mirror. 

I sometimes wonder about these duplicate beings. Are they making themselves splendid so that when they undress their girlfriends have a frisson of utter delight at their physical perfection? Or is it so their mates can admire the amount of weights they can lift? Or is it that this is the form of 21st century male armour: musculature, without which one leaves home feeling - dangerously - naked?

Judy Bailey’s Turning Chinese.

I was sitting in the nearest thing to a barbershop today. It was for women too, but it was the sort of place you queued for a hairdresser. I had felt a little self conscious when I put the Australian Women’s Weekly down, marvelling at Judy Bailey’s latest facelift: and how people gradually become less and less recognisable as they pursue the possibility of arresting a known look. She was half way to turning Chinese. 

Perhaps the fact I had a kiwi male sitting beside me made me self conscious. I had sized him up. Probably a grandfather and, I hesitate to add this, but probably a man who still had sex with his wife (or with someone...) He was grizzled and as full of testosterone as an old wine is full of matured grapes. 

My hairdresser was Russian: she looked worried and had an explosive kind of haircut. I wondered about her past - probably very varied but I decided not to expend any extra energy on talking. 

I surrendered to the haircut.

But gradually I became aware of the grizzled man and his barber talking. It was about the Welsh rugby captain who had revealed he was gay.

The barber offered the opinion that for a gay man to be in a rugby changing room was equivalent, in arousal, of a straight man being in a woman’s changing room. He called this ‘a dream’. The man in the chair agreed enthusiastically. It just wasn’t right. I started listening carefully. 

The conversation was still going when I left. It seemed to offer an almost subliminal sense of excitment to the two men. It had obviously entered their imaginations and they had both gone with it. I reflected on the way both seemed to suppose that only men who were gay looked at other men’s bodies. I grant that gay men look with a special erotic regard. But straight men in showers etc often check each other’s genitalia out. After all the size of the male penis is a pretty big thing in the male psyche. (‘Big swinging dicks’ was the name given to leading stockbrokers during the last financial hysteria.) In gyms males often stand around looking at their own and other male’s physiques.

Perhaps the Welsh rugby captain had pierced through a line between homosocial - the general preference men have to be with men - with homosexual - the preference of some men to have sex with other men. It worried them as much as it excited them. As I walked out, one of the men said something about how being a half back would obviously be a really exciting thing for a gay man. 

I have to confess I had to turn to Wikipedia to find out that this meant being in a scrum. 

It’s a rather hard fact for rugby fanatics to accept but rugby pretty much basically came about as a way to deter boys from buggering each other at a posh school. It threw them out of bed and into the mud and cold. So probably it’s not incidental that rugby has so many positions which mimic male sexual positions. 

A standard sight for a defeated rugby team is for the ‘gladiators’ to lie on the field, their rear end up, their heads buried in their hands. Basically they offer an image of a male awaiting anal penetration. 

Sorry to tell you this.

But back to my story.

I wondered why these men were so excited. They did a breif detour through the zone known as: I don’t mind when it’s obvious they’re gay. (I think they meant a man who is obviously effeminate.) What really worried them was a man who was, well, obviously a man. A man full of testosterone. I wonder if they thought of being raped, and whether this was the source of their worried excitment. Or was it the fact ‘they couldn’t tell’ made life so very confusing for them. Either of the two men talking to each other could in fact then be gay.

The Welsh captain’s crime, it seemed, was to pierce through the thin membrane which seperates the homosocial from the homosexual. But the blatant fact that men generally prefer to be with men, just as women generally prefer to be with women - (watch any two middle aged couples out on an evening stroll, two men together and two women together) - makes the tension so much higher if this preference has a sexual component. 

It seemed, that morning, to offer all sorts of possibilies - excitment, fear, dreams, condemnation. 

Neither talked of course what it might mean for young gay men and boys to find out that a leading rugby captain was gay. How it might encourage those who were brilliant at sport but who couldn’t put up with the homophobic climate to give it another chance. I should know. When I was thirteen I was a champion sprinter at Mt Albert Grammar. But the sport world seemed so foreign, so hostile I decided to give it all away. 

Now I look back and feel I cheated myself of a possibility. 

But that’s how it was.

And that’s how it still is, at least in a barbers shop in Hamilton, in January 2010.

After being knocked down by Susanna Mailolo, the Holy Father wakes up....

In a shock annoucement today Pope Benedict XVI said that he wished to change the meaning of Christmas. In a global message he said next year’s Christmas would be a celebration of the single person. The time-honoured version of Christmas celebrating the family had revealed itself to be bankrupt. Christmas has basically devolved, he said, into a pagan festival in which the worship of consumer items and the search of alcohol-driven oblivion had taken over from any religious meaning. 

He acknowledged for the first time that Christmas was simply a replacement of the more ancient Roman ceremony known as Saturnalia and that the idea that 25 December marked the birth of Jesus was a tidy fiction completely unrelated to fact. Nobody knew when or where Jesus was born, he now admitted. The twentyfirst century called for some degree of honesty, he said, even in such a time-worn institution as the Catholic Church.

 

As for the popular belief that Christmas, in the end, was all about children, The Holy Father acknowledged that Christmas has simply become a means of training children in the way of greed. It also became a form of purchasing love. Christmas had become, he said, a way of grooming children for capitalism. It was an exploitation of innocence. Children had become the worst victims of Christmas. The Church, he said, would consider forms of compensation. Perhaps even the entire body of the Church, its Swiss accounts, land holdings, art and antiques, might be liquidated and donated to the poor children of the world. This was entirely possible, he said.

The old idea that Christmas was all about family had also proved to be a fallacy. In fact every year the festival was dictated by guilt, fears of loneliness and the need for shaky economies to spur on consumer spending. He acknowledged the festival of Christmas was a complete sham. People who were related to each other simply by birth spent time together reliving ancient traumas. It was not healthy for the human race. It was time to take a break.

It was time, he said, to appreciate the radical role of the single person. Without the single person overpopulation, a form of global pollution, would be crippling. The future of the world, of humans, depended on the single person. In such a radical step against orthodox Catholic doctrine, which believed that women should breed as much as possible, to produce more Catholics and also remain in their proper subervient state, he said he had looked into his heart and found he must speak out for the rare value and beauty of the single individual. Those who did not breed deserved the highest praise. 

An entire festival would occur next 25 December in which the single individual would be highly praised. Those in families would fast for the entire month of December, to acknowledge their guilt in placing undue demands on the earth’s slender resources. On the 25 December, it was the role of families to locate single persons in their community and worship them. This did not involve gifts or alcohol, carols outside their windows or invitations to ‘parties’. It involved silence. 25 December would become, for the first time in history, a real day of contemplation. Silence would be enjoyed around the world. Humans would listen to the sound of birds, the loveliness of a blade of grass slowly growing. It would be as it was, in the beginning. It was a beautiful idea, he said, whose time had come.

When asked by a journalist how he was feeling after being knocked down by 25 year old Susanna Maiolo, he shocked his audience by saying it was this which had brought him to his senses. She was a single person, just as he, in his heart, was a single man. He wished people to understand that the information that she had ‘psychological problems’ was a way of diminishing the real import of her action. She had been a bearer of the word. And the word had reached him. And now he understood. 

He proposed that Susanna Mailolo join Australia’s Mary McKillop as the Catholic Church’s newest saint. ‘What we once believed to be heretic turned out to be simply the bearer of the Truth’.

The new book goes fishing...

I’ve been trying to put my thoughts in order about The Troweena Sea. You see, I even resent writing the title as I feel this only adds publicity to a best-selling book. Yet I’m equally unwilling to use Witi Ihimaera’s name, as this appears to ‘make it personal’. My urge to make sense of the situation comes from the fact this book, which was going to be withdrawn, when the plagiarism allegations first came out has not been withdrawn at all. It is now the best selling fiction book by a New Zealander, within New Zealand.

My question is: what does this say about us? First of all, there is the cynicism of the publishing company. Penguin have obviously decided it is better to make money rather than adhere to its announced principles that it would seek to withdraw the book. Similarly the author himself made a great deal of the fact he himself would be personally paying for the stock of the book which remained in the warehouse. One could ask now: has this actually happened? Or did the author collude with the publisher in cynically allowing more books out into the shops?

Or is this incorrect thinking? Perhaps the publisher just decided to leave those books already out in stock, in bookshops., to remain there. Perhaps booksellers pleaded with the publishers to allow the book to remain in stock.

Ihimaera has long been one of New Zealand’s best selling literary authors. The fuss apparently has not stopped people buying the book. Indeed there is every evidence that the fuss has aided the sale of the book.

These thoughts were partly prompted by two friends who had bought the book.

One is an archivist, the other an arts administrator. Both are women. And both reported that the book was not a plagiarised text but a fantastic read. This  appalled me. I have heard of people buying the book on the belief that it will become a collector’s item. (Unfortunately already too many have been sold.) But I would have expected people who were knowledgeable about the arts would have understood the issues.

What are the issues? I believe they are complicated by contemporary art’s use of sampling, of copyng, of ‘appropriating’. This is widespread through the visual arts (‘quotation’) and through the musical arts (‘sampling’.) Why should the literary arts be any different? Or does the difference go to the heart of the way in which writing differs from other art forms. Writing can use quotes, but in books of any quality, these quotations are sourced. It is a way of honouring the work other people have done before you. Not to do so is to appropriate someone else’s work. Cultural appropriation, by pakeha people, of Maori subject matters is a very hot area.

What do we have then when a Maori kaumatua, for Ihimaera is such, is found out appropriating by and large pakeha sources without any acknowledgement? We have the strange kind of muffled crisis we have experienced. Maori have been singularly silent on the situation. They are used to seeing their own people constantly attacked. It does not do to attack your own kind. But pakeha writers, with some notable exceptions, have also been discretely silent. The problem is partly personal. Most writers know Witi Ihimaera. He is capable of great charm. But I would not be the first person to say he is also capable of considerable malice. He’s a rounded character, after all - not the demi-plaster saint he was in risk of becoming after the popular success of the film ‘The Whale Rider’.

Witi Ihimaera’s role of cultural ambassador is something worth looking at in more detail. Ever since his first, stunningly simple and eloquent stories emerged he has had what can only be called a very good ride. He became a diplomat, that most carefully judged of silver tongued careers. Latterly, when the hard work of gay liberation had been done, he came out as gay. He also became more vocal about Maori rights once the hard work of Maori radicalism had been done. In one way New Zealand has needed a man like Ihimaera - charming, personable, bicultural. Adaptable. He has been heaped with richnesses. A man who has not got a particularly illustrious academic record is a professor at a leading university where he himself teaches writing. Only this year he was given a laureateship - perhaps the final poisoned gift to a man heaped with honours, aroha and mana.

Has this crisis changed anything? Not according to the people who have rushed out to buy the book. I have heard one author say that the book was unreadable, lurching from style to style awkwardly. But Ihimaera’s writing style is not the point. People buy his books to hear from a bicultural ambassador, a charming man who knows ‘how to tell a good story’. And pakeha people like hearing Maori stories. And after all, telling stories is what authors do. Or rather writing them. This is where we get into difficulties. Unacknowledged appropriating is really just theft. It appears to have been a careless, unthought out act, by someone who presumably assumed he was untouchable in New Zealand culture. There was a huge demand for another book. He gave in. It’s not the end of the world, but it tends to dent the charisma, the mana of the man. It’s not a good look. Every book he produces from now on will be tainted by suspicions of intellectual theft.

People say, of course, Shakespeare borrowed. Recently Ian McEwan, a writer of real talent and originality, has been accused of plagiarism at least twice. But I don’t think in either case we are talking of actually taking literal chunks out of someone else’s research and writing, then plastering them over into the main body of the work. Or have we, as Ihimaera himself suggested, just arrived at a postmodern moment when intellectual theft is a chic form of experimentation? Would Maori think the same thing if, for example, I simply took something oral and ancestral, then put it into the main text of my work, as if I had originated it? I don’t think so.

Is it a case of double standards - the cultural double standards that bedevil New Zealand life. (Hone Harawira, loathing white people, but needing to go to the centre of white culture, Paris....) 

In the end this cultural event says alot about contemporary New Zealand: Ihimaera’s outing as a plagiarist by someone who lives overseas (who within New Zealand would have dared dent the mana of the plaster saint?) Ihimaera’s misjudging of the severity of the crisis by appearing in public receiving a large sum of money even after the plagiarism was public knowledge: surely the diplomat within him would have dictated a discrete professorial holiday at some welcoming overseas university (Hawaii comes to mind)...a public statement that he would not accept the laureateship this year...a little modesty in the situation would have been a sign of atonement.  The university which so desperately needed a bicultural ambassador - what was once called a friendly Maori - that they would accept plagiarism as something intellectually acceptable and even negligible - surely a nadir in the annals of universities becoming thinly disguised moneyshops. The book still stays in the bookshops. People are buying it probably at this very moment for a Christmas present. Some people believe, like money in Hanover Finance, it will be a good investment. Other people just like a good story. Shame that significant parts of it were written by other people - who remain unacknowledged. But that’s not a problem, is it? 

Is it?

Of course Witi Ihimaera will be reborn. The phoenix which has lived through such staggering social political racial and sexual change, always morphing at an appropriate moment, will, I am sure, re-emerge in an emotion-drenched scene some time in the future. He is one of the characters of twentieth-century New Zealand. When a friend of mine, who had a history of heroin addiction in his twenties, but then went on to become one of the leading ad men in New Zealand - before being found with heroin again - said blithely: it only adds to the story. The adman knew something. Witi’s story is not finished. We can perhaps expect a few tears on Mark Sainsbury, or whoever is around at prime time when Witi, like Coco Chanel, makes his inevitably dramatic tear-wrenching re-entrance. The crowd will weep. Then, barely stopping to mop up their tears, this largely pakeha audience will feel that twitch in their being which indicates: it is all over.  Their fingers will be blindly feeling for their eftpost and credit cards before they line up obediently to buy the new book.

The new book goes fishing....again.

The beautiful anarchy of thought

I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s - part of a baby boom generation which, ironically,  had severely limited information on sexuality. 

These are some of the pamphlets my mother, through a veil of embarrassment, passed to me - much as a visitor to a prison might slide family photos over to a prisoner who did not know of the existen

ce of a new family member. 

I remember the mass of grey print, the dull diagrams - the complete absence of information on matters which were chaotically, pressingly important to me - questions so vast they could barely be compressed into words and language - and this was, because, in that time, the language did not yet exist: it had yet to 

be invented. 

So one existed in a strangely darkened landscape in which certain things had a spherical power - a power which is hard to evoke in these days of global pornography, when the net has created a virtual-reality in which anyone can find the most graphic images of every form of sex at the touch of a button: an overabundance of information seeming to neatly echo the period in which I grew up, which was a starvation of information.

But like all people who live in oppressive situations one learnt to search for signs of life. 

My mother believed in education. She believed in the efficacy of art institutions. She also had a busy social life and knew that the kiddies could be dropped off at the Auckland War Memorial Museum or the Auckland Art Gallery and we could spend three to four hours maximum for the price of half a crown. 

We would be unmolested, self patrolling, carefully rationing our money - half a crown was a beautifully heavy coin, having a heft and weight in your short’s pocket -  as we walked along the dim passageways and vast rooms - knowing that the worst excesses of boredom would be mediated by that most crucial moment of decision 

: a Coke versus a Fanta. 

But inbetween times my brother and I had the beautiful anarchy of thought. We could gaze at whatever fascinated us. 

And in the echoing chambers of the Museum, where you heard distant voices and the sound of footsteps echoing against marble - in an atmosphere which aurally was always special and even faintly votive and church-like - we found ourselves inevitably, as before a predestined spot 

- coming to a complete lull of stillness before something which shocked us both into silence.

This was Laocoon - in those days having its own special niche on the ground floor. This plaster statue did something to us. We feasted our eyes on the drama - a family - a father and two boys - just like Russell and myself - but somehow enmeshed in a life and death Freudian drama - a snake coiling round their  - and this is what really fascinated us - their beautiful naked limbs. 

In time my brother and I would recognise we were both seperately and together gay. At the time all we knew was the deep lurch into silence - that soundless fall - that immense move into silent close-up.

Did these statues offer us what we could never have in life? That was stillness of an object of desire. We lived near the most popular beach in the unfashionable western suburbs - we haunted the changing sheds, as most of the local kids did. But what we saw there were random glimpses, sudden and startling protuberances hastily buried in ugly woollen togs. Here was a naked abandon, a refusal to be clothed

. The very stillness of the statues opened themselves up beautifully to our gaze. They were as immobile as the stillness and fervency of our desire. 

And what beautiful bodies they had.  They could be seen in physique magazines - but here they were, for free, sanctified by antiquity, raised up by being in a temple of art. We two small boys copped an eyeful very gratefully, at the same time somewhat queasily aware that other people passing by found our stillness unnatural - out of the ordinary - queer, for lack of a better word. 

Other people drifted by, their glance not caught on these statues of male beauty. 

  Yet we were also aware that before us had come other wanderers, other seekers - even today, in June 2009, I was startled - and pleased - to see the vine over the bulging Fallen Gladiator’s crotch was darkened by touch. 

This good luck token, this desire to actually cop a feel, broke all the ordinances of art: look don’t touch. Whereas in your mind you were constantly substituting LOOK for TOUCH. 

And as such, these beautiful statues, arising from cultures in which male beauty was held in such a high regard - passed on their silent message to travellers in a darkened and ill-lit landscape - a landscape with too few lovers (but with a startlingly high teenage pregnancy rate) - a land in which information was lacking and touch was mediated by the law.

((This is part of a talk I gave this year on the absence of eroticism in New Zealand art....))

Bisexual

The midday news has just announced that Glenn Mills has died in Mt Eden Prison. It’s impossible not to feel in the newsreader’s even tones that she is inferring a sense of natural justice. He is, after all, the man who knowingly infected a large number of men and women with HIV-Aids. It’s a terrible thing to do but unfortunately it is a human thing to do.     

Let’s untie the bundle a bit. Glenn Mills was genuinely bisexual. In the early days of gay liberation we believed two mutually incompatible things. One was that everyone was inherently bisexual - that all humans existed on a continuum of sexuality and most people could be responsive to people of both the same and different gender. This was a radical idea, a beautiful idea. It posited the concept that nobody was one thing. It implied flexibility, motion, accessability. 

But at the same time, in our inner hearts, I think we disbelieved this. We believed all bisexual men were actually closeted homosexuals too timid to come out. Bisexuality, after all, was a useful transfer station for men who were in public positions. Secretly they could be gay. They would have sexual relationships with other men. Publically they were ‘engaged’ or had a ‘long term relationship’ with a woman. Or sexless marriages.

Society rewards heterosexuality in so many ways both legally and in terms of approval that this kind of closetry used to be widespread and to a degree still is. On Brothers & Sisters, there was the witty line from the gay brother about someone allegedly bisexual which went ‘Bi now, gay later.’ (as in ‘Buy now, etc.’) It was funny and bitchy and encapsulated a gay point of view. 

But as I’ve gone on in life I have come to the conclusion there are many men who are genuinely bisexual. They have an erotic response to both men and women. It’s not surprising after all. And in the morality-free zone of the net, this kind of experimentation has flourished. The public necessity for declaring sexual preference has almost vanished. It has certainly lost its dreaded taboo status, and as such has accrued a kind of so-what neutrality. 

But in the end, men prefer to keep their erotic response to other men private, secret. Unlike lesbianism, which enjoys a strong tillation factor with heterosexual men, homosexual sex is seen as publically unacceptable. So bisexual men tend to not be out publically. 

Why would you? The net delivers what you want to your door, a kind of take-out sexuality, entirely private. What you do in your own space remains your own business. But it does mean that bisexuality, genuine bisexuality, tends to go uninspected in general society - as in this case, with desperate results. 

But what’s this to do with the very sad death of a man in prison?

I suppose I am thinking of the essential loneliness of Glenn Mills. There isn’t a bisexual support group that I know of. Bisexuals tend to be, as wise old Edmund White has said, disliked and distrusted by both homosexuals and heterosexuals. This is because they don’t fit in either camp and, at certain moments, betray both forms of sexual preference. (If you are genuinely bisexual, your response is going to keep shifting all the time, I assume. If you love a woman, you will also, at some point, want to have sex with a man. If you love a man, you’ll want, at some point, to have sex with a woman.) It’s not quite the ideal world we at one time believed in.

And I think it gets very complicated. Heterosexuals don’t use condoms on the whole for casual sex. Young gay men fool themselves into believing that HIV-Aids has an age-category and they are fool proof. Anal sex is fun. It has also eased out of being an entirely homosexual pleasure. It is as much on the heterosexual pleasure menu as oral sex (at one time also an almost exclusive homosexual pleasure.) So it seems very easy for one good looking bisexual man to infect a large number of eager, unsuspecting and - unquestioning - sex partners.

I am not excusing the knowing transmission of Hiv-Aids. That is callous and a terrible human mistake to make. I know raising the word condom in the quick blindess of lust is difficult - but the difficult fact is use of a condom has to be mandatory, I’m afraid, in casual anal sex until the virus disappears. 

So I guess I am asking the people infected: you need to also bear some responsibility here. Hiv-Aids has been around a long time and everyone in a sexual encounter, no matter how hot has to think. 

I could have a long disabling illness from this. I could suffer from something for which there is no known cure.

I remember the photos of  Mills, a train driver. He looked handsome, personable, possibly, even probably a good lover. Being a good lover is one of the joys of the world. Finding a good lover is a great thing. Obviously Glenn Mills was a player. I don’t have an attitude on that. Why not enjoy what the world has to offer? At different times we want different things - marriage, a stable partnership, love are only one way to be human. 

So I can’t help but feel a kind of sadness to hear today that Glenn Mills committed suicide. Suicide is always unbearably sad. And perhaps more so, when a person feels it is their ‘natural duty’. 

There is no nature, apart from variation.

But there is shame, an everlasting shame which all people who diverge from the norm experience at some moments in their lives. 

At times this shame can be so suffocating that there appears no way out.

Unfortunately, for Mills, he found a way out. 

But there are larger unanswered questions here. He dies in prison while his ‘victims’ who colluded in the act of irresponsibility live with the after-effects.

Meanwhile there is a lack of awareness of the degree of bisexuality and sexual experimentation occuring in society. Right now. Right here. While we speak.

I question whether prison is the right place for someone in Mills’ position.

I don’t think so.

The Biographer’s Doubt 2..

‘Most biographers have an infantile fixation on their hero/subjects, and want to idealise them and turn them into their fathers.’ - Hermione Lee on why Freud thinks people write biographies.

Was I seeking an ideal father? I have been pondering my relationship to Colenso, this quirky, difficult man, wondering if I have over-invested in resuscitating Colenso’s historical reputation. Why, I wondered, did I feel a companionship with this strange, isolated man? Or does this answer the query? 

Was this search for an alternative father the Freudian basis of my interest in him however? It was a disturbing thought. My own father was nothing like Colenso - in fact I think Colenso would have been a nightmare of a father in some ways - overbearing, impossible, too opinionated, too needy - and too generous. Both his sons - Latimer, the legitimate one and Wiremu - the illegitimate son - both became English gentleman, living on the money William endlessly gave them. He spoiled them. Literally, perhaps. Latimer always strikes me as a rather narrow-hearted man, a shard of a person. Wiremu - well, there is another story there, probably an entire novel....or work of nonfiction. (I understand a Canadian relative, a female academic, is writing a book on Wiremu Colenso, a fascinating enigma of a character.)

So - am I seeking a substitute father? I can’t answer that. What I can say is what I value in William Colenso: that is a hot witness, an agitated voice, an almost impure subject - someone who is not slow to speak, have an opinion. He also saw and thought and wrote at a key time in New Zealand’s history. He changed his opinions over his life time. He was versatile. He was, I suppose, when you get down to it, an eye witness.This for me - a person who loves the smell and density and darkness and strangely shaped corriders and underground tunnels of history - is what I really like about William Colenso. He leads me into the past, shines a torch over things which might have otherwise remained unseen, unknown - even unthought of. 

And finally, his own moral complexity - his ‘fall from grace’ - makes him a good companion. A man uneasy in his own skin is an interesting person, a contemporary person. He was vivid, gabby, opinionated, often wrong, often right. But he was never neutral, cautious, prim. He was an individual. So probably I’m not so much seeking a father as a guide/companion as I walk backwards - or is it forwards? - into the past. 

Oh, and a rather nice daddy wouldn’t hurt....thanks, Mr Freud.