Elstro

First of all, the title is somewhat misleading. Hear that, Daily Mail? I’m not a misogynistic old queen.

Here I aim to explore one of my more personal issues, touched upon in earlier blogs. My relationship with the gay community.

First of all, this may be an outmoded viewpoint in 2010, but I always thought being gay simply meant being sexually attracted to men. Nothing more, nothing less. Admittedly being gay gives me more freedom to enjoy cheesy pop music and other such effete activity. However, people, especially other gay men, have been shocked or bemused by the concept that I like cars (and no, not pink cabriolets) and some rock music. I remember being in a gay chat room and mentioning this – guess what happened? Cries of “we’ve got a straight in here, get him out”.  A gay guy I got talking to recently cut me off mid-sentence with the corker “Are you sure you’re gay?!” because I have knowledge of and an extended interest in, cars.

I have never felt the need to scream at 180dB how fabulous Britney is, and spend my life on the scene. If you want to do that, good for you. In a sense being gay is also liberating because you are free to be as outrageous as you want. However, I have never understood why some gays have to be bitchy and nasty to everyone they meet who isn’t just like them.  And I have no time whatsoever for gay guys on Twitter who insist on using it as a knocking shop and scrawling ‘NO FEMALES!’ on their Twitter bios. Misogyny is not attractive. At all. After 43 years since decriminalisation and a slow and winding road to acceptance by all, nastiness to others is completely counterproductive.

Because of the shit I have suffered from other gay guys regarding my weight in the past, I always put the barriers up whenever I meet other gay guys. And seeing bitchy/screamy queens portrayed in the media make me ashamed to be gay. Examples include BB5′s Marco Sabba, Louie Spence, Ross from Series One of World’s Strictest Parents (look it up, your eyes will pop out – he is everything I hate about gayness…so much I found myself wishing to see him get gaybashed), Jason Gardiner, Craig Revel Horwood….the list goes on. Why can’t we have a variety of gay male representation across the media. I don’t mean the dreadful farce of “straight-acting” by the way. Just something other than the bitchy Mr-Humpries-On-helium characters. Look at Gok Wan. He is a flamboyant dandy of a gentleman, yes, but he isn’t a bitch. His USP is the wonders he does for people’s self confidence without being nasty about it. Joe McElderry is an interesting kettle of fish. I’m no fan, but the way everyone’s been going on about how brave he is at coming out (are we living in 1975?) is ridiculous. The best reaction he could have had was…NO outcry. Let’s face it, how many gay singers are there? Joe is not exactly a screaming queen, in fact he seems like a regular guy…who just happens to be gay.

I’m not saying being camp is wrong. It’s part of who some people might be and that’s what should be celebrated. But I don’t think I should be forced into liking every gay guy I meet just because we have that one thing in common  - we like to sleep with men instead of women. I’m all for gay male solidarity, but until certain portions stop the bitchiness, we are still on a long road to equality.

Today, people of all ages, creeds and walks of life will be pulling together and all sporting purple attire of some sort in honour of 6 teenage boys who committed suicide in recent weeks/months. Why? You may ask. After all, according to the Daily Mail, teenagers just do it for attention because they’re confused/hormonal blah blah blah.

Well no. It was all down to homophobic abuse in their homes and at their schools. From places that are supposed to care for them. All because of a part of their personality that they were born with. I myself have suffered mild homophobic abuse, not from my amzing family, thank fuck, but from people at school, and sometimes total strangers who know toss all  about me. Luckily for me, it has only ever been the odd shout of “poof” etc. I have never been driven to suicide or been gaybashed. Touch wood.

What sickens me the most is people who have been disowned/abused by their families simply for being gay. Surely when you have children, you should make a vow to love them unconditionally. If your son or daughter comes out to you, how about, rather than wringing your hands together with worry because in the next 25 years you may not be able to buy future grandkids nice presents, how about you take a good look at the fear and appeal in your child’s eyes. They are looking to you for support and love, not rejection. You cannot, in my opinion be called a parent, if you have the ability to hate your own child for being who they are. I was lucky that my mom didn’t give a damn. She supported me from the word go. Some people aren’t so fortunate. And, if you think stuff like “oh I’d beat it out of my son if he was queer” maybe you should reconsider whether you should be a parent.

These are just some of the gems that have appeared on the page for this very campaign:

“i support the bullying against faggots, if you want to be gay then suffer the punishment”

“I didn’t realise taking it up the arse was considered in good faith….”

“God Made Adam and Eve, not Adam Steve” (yawn)

“HEY GAYS, IF GAYS HAVE IT RIGHT THEN WHY CAN’T THEY REPRODUCE? surely a civilization cannot keep going while you people plow each other in the asshole all night!”

“im glad they killed them selves… makes 6 less dumb fuks in the world…dont see y it would matter if theyre gad or not. its so widely excepted anymore.. almost half the people i know are “gay” or “bi-sexual” and if theyre so emabarred by it that they had to kill them selves then good.theyre fkn stupid.i just feel srry for theyre families but then again their the ones that raised the little retards.im not wearin purple for dumarses like them.”

I can’t name these charming souls for libel reasons, but rest assured they know who they are. How many times do we have to bash into these people’s heads that we don’t CHOOSE. Let me put it another way – we really choose to cop all this abuse and bullying, don’t we?  How stupid can you get.

Why, after 43 years, are we still living in a society where ill-informed individuals feel the need to attack people they barely know, or are supposed to love, for simply being attracted to someone of the same sex? As predicted, people who probably normally don’t give a tinker’s toot about Christianity will wheel out the tired old misquotations from the Bible in order to make their small-mindedness valid.

So why purple? Purple represents Spirit on the LGBT flag. Please show some spirit, even if it’s just for the one day.  So anyone who reads this blog, please wear purple on October 20th. Please, we as fellow human beings beg you all – tell your friends, family, colleagues, neighbours and schools if you must.

Tyler Clementi, Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg, Raymond Chase and Billy Lucas. Don’t let boys and girls who may be suffering what these poor kids went through, feel alone. And that Joshua Melo and Matthew Shepherd did not die in vain.

Chronophobia is the fear of time, or more specifically, time passing. Apparently it is most prevalent in prison inamtes with long sentences. Basically, it generates feelings of fear, anxiety and short breathing at the prospect of time passing. Otherwise known as going ‘stir-crazy’. I think I developed a slight case of this in the summer of 2008, after a seedy event in my life cause me to have a Getrude from Hamlet moment – it forced me to look totally into myself and I saw the “black and grained spots”  i.e was absolutely horrified by what I saw.  Even an episode of Jonathan Creek delved into this curious phobia – a chronophobic character played by Dermot Crowley in a 1998 episode (“Time Waits For Norman”) actually removes hands off clocks and concocted an elaborate scheme in order to give himself “more time.” Even David Renwick’s brilliant dialogue perfectly encapsulated the concept of the phobia:

“Time? It’s slipping through out fingers…faster than ever….time can never be reclaimed. What is the past..where does it go?” (paraphrased-ish)

Which is obvious – time can indeed be never reclaimed.

“No point raking over the past.”

“Stop living in the past”

“You can’t change the past!”

“Get over it.”

All of the above may be true, so these all being the case, why are we all guilty of doing them? You can’t go back in time. Yet people always look to the past almost out of desperation when their world comes crashing down around them. Like inEastenders or any soap, say some character has an affair, one of the first lines they are guaranteed to utter is “If I could turn the clock back, I would.” Wouldn’t it be the answer to so many of our problems if we could? We’d all love to have a time turner like in Harry Potter. I know I would.

I myself spend, and have spent a great many years with my head buried in a sandpit of “What If”s. What if I’d got off my backside sooner and realised that at 16, most other gays go out and fuck everything in trousers for example? What if I’d realised that not everyone at school was out to get me? What if I had done this? Then this would have happened…the list just goes on and on. For me, hindsight is a curse and frankly I’d be better off forgetting everything. One thing I’ve always been guilty of is judging people on their own pasts and usually flying into a jealous rage because they have a more interesting past than me. All I have to show for my 21 years on this earth is a string of missed oppertunities, failed auditions and jobs, and a sexual past even the most repressed gay would sneer at. But does this really matter in the here and now?

I know damn well I can’t turn the clock back. I can’t go back five years, bleach my hair and start advertising myself as the newest boi/chicken on the gay scene. Nor could I go back fifteen years and realise that kids make friends when they start school, not running around the playground in their own little world. Not just that far back  - I even fume at recent events such as “what if I’d put my camera in my pocket, least it wouldn’t be sitting on my table with a buggered screen”. But the sad fact is, yes, the past does matter. Because the past has shaped me into who I am today. And I don’t like what I am today. So I almost explode with frustration at my past self because it could have been a whole new kettle of fish had I stopped and realised what was happening in the REAL world, not just my own.

But yet, I don’t get people firing 20 questions at me for what I did six months ago, nor do they tell me they can’t have anything to do with me because of what I did on 22 October 2004. (Nothing noteworthy probably – knowing me probablpy another wasted day in front of a screen. YAWN.)

So to conclude another day’s innate ramblings. Yes, the past does have a meaning. You only have one shot at life. Therefore you should get the most out of it. Otherwise you will end up a sad and bitter old grouch. Just like me.

It depends on the individual, but I have always thought that these have gone hand-in-hand. Throughout childhood and most of my teens I was quite slim, growing from a skinny child into a broad-shouldered yet reasonably thin boy. I had no confidence in myself at all because I struggled with bullying and fitting in at school (yeah bring out the violins). Although I was never bullied for my appearance, people thought of me as a freak  because I refused to be a sheep. In my late teens I went through a few dark times, and the thought of leaving sixth form (that’s high school to any American readers) a virgin was too horrific to bear.  I lacked the knowledge and confidence to go out on the scene, so I tried going online. First guy I tried to meet with when I was 17, and he came to my work…but that backfired, with an idiot colleague’s interference and subsequent harassment at work from local chavs. The icing on this cake was my talking to the guy online again that night. I was called “podgy” and “unfanciable.” And we never spoke again.Charming.

Me at 18 - Grossly overweight

So with the stress of striving for Uni, work, learning to drive, and the realisation that I would never get laid, came the comfort eating. By the time I left school in May 2007 I was 18, weighed a whopping 17 stone, heavier than I’d ever been in my life. Proof that being a teenage chicken doesn’t always guarantee men lining up to bed you.

It is the classic cliche you find in Take A Break, but it really took a set of holiday snaps from a holiday to Cornwall to shock me into seeing what I had become. I used to work at a shabby convenience store back then, and I use to lard up with junk food purchased every shift before going home for my tea. Quite often the entire contents of my un-necessary shopping would be shovelled down my gluttonous neck  before I went to bed. At the time I was finally in my first relationship, and I was the most arrogant, cockiest bastard you could meet. Now that I’d lost my virginity (unbelievable when you see how appalling I looked at the time) I thought I was the dogs bollocks and treated my poor then-boyfriend as a free rent boy, only seeing him when it suited me. I even went out on the North Bucks gay scene once to try and see if I could cheat (yeah, my delusion really knows no bounds sometimes), but as expected, people were repulsed by my drunken sweaty waddling.  I naively didn;t realise this at the time, but obviously there is only so much shit you can put someone through in a relationship before they walk away. My boyfriend dumped me via MySpace in July 2007 when I came back from holiday – but to be honest by then I’d got so enormously fat that it was only to be expected. I spent that summer immersed in GYUK chat rooms, with horrendously photoshopped pictures, trying desperately to see if I could grab male attention. Of course it doesn’t work,  I got bullied relentlessly online for my weight, despite never putting up one body shot. One incident sticks out most in my mind, and it still haunts me to this day: Some skinny shades-wearing queen (according to his display photo) under the username “gay richie 1991″ (if you ever read this, weep you shallow cuntbag) minced into a chatroom and proclaimed at large “the maximum jeans size should be a 36, anything over that is chubby and gross” and also came out with the corker “6 stone is the sexiest weight”.  Already feeling insecure and having already been on the receiving end of online fat abuse prior to this, I challenged him. Without a flinch, he called me chubby and gross (which I was anyway), despite knowing nothing about me or who I was.

My few forays onto the gay scene have always made me feel like shit. Partly because I never pulled, and partly because it makes me feel horrendously insecure. Throughout early 2008 my weight fluctuated, and during a long and depressing summer between first and second year, I went on a major exercise regime and by September I managed to go from 16 stone 7 to a respectable 13 stone. My shirt size dropped from an XL to an M but I only managed to shift 3 inches from my waistline, going from a 40/38″ to a 36″. I later dropped further to a 34″ waist around January 2009.

Me at 20: January 2009 - slim but still not happy

Second year I managed to keep the weight off, with only a few pounds gained here and there, but I still wasn’t Mr Gay UK material, and by that time I was terribly unhappy. I mhad managed to slim down, but I was being eaten away inside by the fact that I was approaching 20 and still had only been with 3 men. The moment I arrived back at Uni, every spare day was spent meeting men met  off gaydar. In my eyes, I felt I couldn;t be a proper gay unless I’d had a sexual track record as high as the Millau Bridge. My sluttiest phase (for me) was fucking one man a day, every day (& on 3 occasions, 2 men in 1 day) for one continuous week.  The sad thing is, for some, that’s playing it cool. That week was extreme, but I still averaged two new sexual partners a week for most of that time. In my eyes, I had 3 years to catch up on to gain the sufficient amount of sexual experience for a modern gay 20 year old boy…when I was 19. My weight and negative body image had held me back for so long and now that I’d lost a lot of it, I realised that I’d wasted my entire late-teens worrying about trivial stuff. As far as I was concerned, I should have been a skinny little twink, with a Toni & Guy haircut (which I did have by this time funnily enough) and getting it in the ass from about a hundred men. Not the flabby nerdish loner I actually was. I felt like I was a disgrace to the word gay, because I wasn’t a cookie-cutter scene queen. Even now I am shit scared of going into a gay club or bar for fear of the barrage of nasty remarks from skinny queens.

August 2009 - At my slimmest and happy with my life

Looking back on second year in my current state, I  long to be that shape again, even if AussieBum wouldn’t have been in any huirry to ask me to model for them. In recent months, standards have slipped somewhat and I have started to gain weight again. I am still wearing M-size shirts and 34″ jeans, but they are a tight fit as opposed to a loose fit. Since being with my boyfriend I expunged my neurotic lifestyle of Slim Fast and casual sex and finaly felt happy in my body and life.  In August-October 2009 I was regularly cycling and eating healthily, and in September I went on a vegan diet. The veganism didn’t directly result in weight loss, but it certainly added to it. Now despite now being a vegetarian, I once again am having flashbacks to 2007-8 and I know that my weight is starting to creep back up – on my 21st birthday I was dismayed to see that I had passed the 14 stone mark once again. The only upside to this weight issue is that just after Christmas, some 34″ jeans from Primark that I’d bought in November  wouldn’t even come up over my thunder thighs, but trying them again a fortnight ago, they actually fit me again. So I guess I have lost some pounds in the last few months, but gained plenty more (this was evident when I bought some new skinny jeans from Topman last month, and they would barely do up, despite my owning another 34″ set)- in short- I have to face facts, change what I eat and get my arse back on that bike!

April 2010 - After Weight Gain; you can see the M-size tee is under a heck of a strain

I don’t know what my current weight is, and what’s more, something is stopping me from telling everyone. I’m scared that people might sneer at me and turn on me for letting myself get so fat. I’m also aware that I may be judged for making blinkered attacks on my fellow gays and for being such a laughably virginal gay teen.

This probably is unusual for me because I don’t consider myself a typical gay blogger. Writing about my weight issues online has been a cathartic experience, espeically because I’ve correlated it with my experiences of gay culture, but I would really like to hear your views on this issue I’ve raised here.

Have you felt pressurised to be super-skinny because of what you;ve seen in Gay Times?  Have you struggled with weight issues yourself since coming out? Has anyone else comfort-ate? I want to know your views an experiences!

Feel free to comment, tweet direct message or email and I will respond to you as soon as I can (usually on the day, but bear with me, I will get back to you!)

The cast of Shank

NOTE: SPOILERS! Don’t read if you haven’t seen this!

It is not often I go and see a film, but when I heard about this low-budget indie flick (Or rather, the sex scenes were leaked onto some seedy site!) I had to track it down. Gay cinema is an interesting conundrum – it is either jaded coming-out-against-the-odds stories or about cross-dressing, in the vein of such films as ‘But I’m A Cheerleader’.

Shank is gritty, hard-hitting and uncompromising. As you can see from publicity shots, it is about chavs. More specifically Bristol’s gang scene. Being gay and chavvy, I must admit, is a delicious topic to explore as it’s something that we suspect goes on, but don’t want to admit. Similar to being a queer footballer, I suppose. Shank has been described as “Beautiful Thing on coke” which holds several truths; like the Jonathan Harvey bestseller, it explores a teenage boy from a rough background and his struggle with his gay feelings towards his best friend.

The story centres around 19-year-old Cal (a fiery debut from newcomer Wayne Virgo), member of a violent happy-slapping gang  from Bristol who is secretly gay. He fancies his thuggish best mate Jonno (Tom Bott, a fantastically nuanced performance), who is screwing the violent gang leader, Nessa (a fantastic turn from Alice Payne).  Cal gets his kicks from anonymous sex with strangers, including Bristol University lecturer Scott (Garry Summers), filming each encounter so he can get turned on by it again later. One day the gang target snooty French boy Olivier (Marc Laurent), a mincing, effeminate youth who is such an antithesis to the gang that you almost aren’t surprised to see him get a pasting. Cal falls for Olivier and the two form a relationship. When Nessa, who, “no fucking body turns against.” finds out, she is determined to get the two faggots once and for all, kidnapping Olvier and taunting Cal via vid-messaging to come and save his boyfriend. Cal stands up to his former allies once and for all, but as the showdown goes on, even Nessa is horrified at what happens….

Undoubtedly Nessa is the main antagonist for the movie; a nasty, temperamental rudegirl who nightmares are made of. Payne sneers and snaps her way through the tight script like Lauren Cooper-meets-Vinnie Jones. Hair scraped back, hoopy earings, a ‘wannabe Yardie’ accent and a plethora of ‘fucks’ and homophobia pouring from her mouth, Payne as Nessa really holds her own against the lads – an impressive turn from the only female lead here. We do see what made Nessa so twisted, and Payne’s brilliantly dramatic performance during that scene grabs the emotions, but the character is such a bitch that it is hard to feel sympathy for her.

Tom Bott as Jonno is also brilliant. The character is a dumb-arse, Nuts-mag-reading stud/jock who is clearly a closet case. Swaggering about the screen, yet showing deep turmoil in his eyes, and the sexual tension between Bott and Virgo is electric; this is easily one of the best performances of the film. Even during the climactic end scene, Bott manages to draw a grain or two of sympathy for Jonno despite his despicable behaviour.

Marc Laurent, was by far the weakest link. Although he showed sufficient amounts of tenderness when required, and managed to deliver English (not his first language, assumed) without sounding wooden, he just doesn’t cut the mustard compared to the rest and seems rather bored a lot of the time. Also, although facially he is striking, personally I found him too skinny and this was somewhat offputting. Also he and Virgo didn’t have much chemistry, even in the sex scenes. When Cal and Jonno almost kiss in Cal’s battered old Escort, the tension between them was so realistic that you find yourself begging Cal to just take Jonno right there and then. Also, would a rough kid like Cal even fancy someone like Olivier, apart from his exotic looks and money?

In a small role, Garry Summers does very well, but he only really gets one emotional scene and no real drama, so I can’t comment too much. Though his sex scene with Virgo is rather erotic, though because this is at the start and you don’t expect to see a chav boy get it in the arse and enjoy it.

Star of the show has to be Wayne Virgo in his first professional role as Cal. He avoids falling into the trap of being the chav who minces or likes a bit of Miley Cyrus (her music, not her tits) and plays it totally straight, Cal not appearing stereotypically gay at all. The only flaw in his performance, is his accent occasionally slipping into something more well-spoken at times.

Overall Shank delivers a powerful story and hits the viewer right in the gonads – no weepy coming-out-against-the-odds here. Undoubtedly director Simon Pearce (just 21 when he shot it – same age as me, unbelievable!!) took a gamble by casting unknowns and using a limited budget, but it pays off  tremendously. No flashy CGI effects or lavish set pieces, the focus is on good, old-fashioned storytelling and proper acting, which you don’t a lot of in Hollywood. Casual, dirty sexual encounters are presented unfiltered and seasoned with copious amounts of charlie. A must see for those who want to see a new breed of gay flicks, and definitely one for those with a fetish for chavs.
Rating: 8/10

Director: Simon Pearce

Written by: Darren Flaxstone and Christian Martin

Starring: Wayne Virgo, Tom Bott, Alice Payne, Marc Laurent.

Likes: First-class acting from Virgo, Payne and Bott, adorable love story, stunning cinematography, unpretentious directing by Pearce, breaks the “coming out story” mould.

Dislikes: A bit too homophobic for its own good, hot sex scenes and nudity mean this is one to watch in company with a pillow over your crotch, some violent scenes which are a bit too disturbing for some, the street-talk is sometimes hard to understand, Laurent is wooden and unbelievable in the role of Cal’s love interest.