Bester

Props for the good taste in music, Elecivil ;). And no, lol, I wasn't calling Xiu Xiu emo... I was making the point that xiu xiu is so much more real and emotional than the ridiculously whiney crap that calls. On the hit and miss point, well, not so sure. Granted, "Support our troops OH" is an irrational rant, but thats the point. Jamie stewart has a breakdown and we get to watch, its great . And oh yeah, blue, here's some more folkyish (non queer) stuff. Iron and Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days This is truly amazing. Hushed, angelic vocals. Banjo and fingerpicked guitar. Heartbreakingly beautiful songs about love, death and god. M Ward - The Transfiguration of Vincent To steal a bit of a review from AMG: M. Ward's Transfiguration of Vincent is nothing less than spectacular. From the buoyant, late-Beatlesque "Vincent O'Brien" to the dank, shuffling, south of the border groove on "Sad, Sad Song," the troubadour manages to capture a timeless folkiness and match it with a surreal and sparkling sense of nostalgia that clearly echoes Tom Waits. Animal Collective - Sung Tongs Seriously weird vocal harmonies, guitars, and repetitive rythmns. Perhaps not for the faint of heart but so great once you get into it. Witch Season by the Court and Spark Kinda alt-country, kinda psych-pop, totally good. Sounds like a sleepy summer afternoon.

Hey Blue: Are you interested in getting into "Queer music", or music by queer artists? Cos the two are quite different. "Queer music" tends to be crap discopop on the gay male side and folky strumming on the lesbian side. If you're interested in a little more variety, here's the list of what a self-confessed music geek (me) thinks was the best music by gay people released last year: Highly Recommended: The Hidden Cameras - Mississauga Goddam The Hidden Cameras are they gayest band in the world. The have mostly naked gogo dancers at their lives shows. They perform in cheap porno theaters. Their songs are called things like "Ban Marriage", "Golden Streams" (yes it is about what you think its about), and "I want another enema". And oh yeah, the frontman, Joel Gibb, is gay. Despite all this, they manage not to come off as a novelty band. The music is utterly gorgeous: acoustic guitar, strings, pipe organ, harps, kettle drums, choirs. Gibb describes it as "gay folk church music", and thats pretty dead on. Mississauga Goddam isn't quite as good as The smell of our own, from last year, but its still well worth checking out. The Magnetic Fields - i Stephin Merritt, who fronts the Magnetic Fields, is 5 feet tall, chubby, unattractive, gay, and deeply cynical. He's also one of the absolute best songwriters working today. No matter who performs his songs, they sound good. For example, a cover of "The book of love", from the MF's 1999 album, 69 Love Songs, was on the shitty soundtrack of the shitty J Lo movie Shall we dance? and it still sounded good. i is cabaret music with the genders and the genres fucked around. Meritt's deep, deep, voice crooning over the top of cello, guitar, bass, keyboard, banjo, and ukulele (yes, ukulele) , singing some of the most bitterly clever lyrics you'll ever hear. Xiu Xiu - Fabulous Muscles The title might make you think big gay dance music. Weeeeell... not quite. This is probably the most compellingly disturbing album released this year. Its kinda emo, in that its emotional. But where most emo is white boys telling you about their pain, Xiu Xiu is Jamie Stewart (their bi front man) blowing his brains out in front of you so you can see exactly whats wrong with him by examining the fragments splattered on the walls. This is deeply, deeply personal, deeply fucked up music. It has the basic form of pop music, but then subverts it with screeches of electronic noise and terrifyingly direct lyrics. Xiu Xiu could be dismissed as pointless shock rockers if it wasn't for the way Stewart sings. His voice hovers somewhere between Ian Curtis and Robert Smith, and he sounds on the verge of a breakdown all the time. Its truly chilling to listen to. If you're not afraid to scare yourself, this is the best art rock album of the year. Also Recommended: American Music Club - Love songs for patriots AMC were one of the best bands of the late 80s and early 90s. They reformed this year to record this album, which is up there with the best of what they produced a decade ago. Bi singer Mark Eitzel is a fantastic lyricist. Tegan and Sarah - So Jealous Indentical twin lesbians from Canada who do kickass folk rock. Good stuff. Thalia Zedek - Trust Not Those In Whom Without Some Touch Of Madness Shes been around for 20 years fronting a number of bands such as Come, this is her second solo record. Indie rock storytelling that doesnt sound a thing like the Indigo Girls. Sorta like the female version of Tom Waits with a bit of Richard Buckner thrown in for good measure. Rufus Wainwright - Want Two Operatic, lush, amazing. Rufus is a legend.

This to me is the paradox. If we want to be seen as different, how can we meaningfully asking to be treated the same. Further, as far as I can see, the whole GLBT community is united by a sense of not belonging in the general community. Can such a disparate community with so little in common continue to exist if the sense of not belonging disappears? I'm not sure it can.

Just had a random thought pop into my head. Seems to me that a lot of the disagreement that has occurred in this thread centres around what people see as the ideal gay community. Is the ideal society one which treats gay people just the same as everyone else, or is it one in which gay people are acknowledged as different and society as a whole changes to allow that difference to thrive and inform the rest of society. So which one is better? This is not a simple question. A similar distinction has existed for decades in the feminist movement - liberal femisits who want equality, and radical feminists who want society to be remodelled and rebuilt without a pro-male bias (and cultural feminists are in the middle there somewhere). There are still many, many proponents of both views. Radical feminists argue that equality and integration is tantamount to relinquishing any distinctive female characteristics and being assimilated into a society which still has pro male assumptions. Liberal feminists argue that the radical's agenda simply serves to ghettoise women. I think both points of view have merit and both perspectives can be meaninfully applied to they gay community. So, in the spirit of this thread, another question, and I'd be interested to here what people think. Is it better for gay people to be treated just like everyone else, or is it better to have our differences acknowledged, celebrated, and form part of our identity? Whats my answer? I'm not sure. Yeah its a copout, but I'm the one asking the question. Maybe I'll have an answer once I've thought for a bit ;).

Interesting place to join this board ;). Hi everyone, and hello again to those of you that know me from elsewhere. Lots of interesting points been made, some of which I agree with, some of which I disagree with. If I may, a few thoughts on some random issues which have been raised. Old Skool vs New Skool queerness To talk about coming out and role models and anything of that nature as simply a matter of "things are different now than they used to be" is horribly reductive. Context is much more than a matter of time. As drake pointed out a while back, location makes a difference to how feasible it is to be out or not. Also, putting things down to time ignores the human element. Even now, people my age (twenty two) are shit scared to come out for whatever reason. Even back in the 50s and 60s, people were coming out and maybe not waving rainbow flags (well, stonewall excepted), but not hiding who they were, either. No one held guns to gay men's heads and MADE them get married. My uncle's been with his current partner for over 20 years. He grew up in rural New Zealand in the 60s and my granddad was a conservative old Englishman. Sure, there was more societal pressure back in the day, but thats what it was, pressure. Not compulsion. To intimate that there was no choice but to stay in the closet and/or get married (not saying anyone here has done that, but I have had the sentiment expressed to me by more than a few people in other contexts) is to denigrate the bravery of the people who didn't. So in summary, yes, things are different now, but people aren't. Individual bravery, cruelty, tolerance, timidity existed then as now, and its these things that are the determining factor of who's out and who's not, in my opinion. Role Models A role model to me is someone I both respect and can identify with. Thus, someone who is gay who I respect makes me feel kinda good about being gay. But equally, I like weird ass obscure music, so someone who I respect who also shares that interest makes me feel good bout the music I like. As a recent law graduate, I look up to michael kirby (mentioned several times previously by graeme) because he is an outstanding judicial mind AND because hes fearless about his sexuality. Equally, I look up to the respected partner at the firm I'm about to start at who is both a great lawyer and has fantastically similar taste in music to me. The point of this ramble is that I think role models are important for everyone, including gay people, but that role models don't need to be gay. It may simply be that I had far bigger insecurities growing up than my sexuality, I never did the self hate thing cos I was gay. I'm sure that for people with issues like that, specifically gay role models are more important. Queer community Gay men are men who like to screw men. Lesbians are women who like to screw women. Bi people like both. Transgender people exist on a completely different continuum. Sexual indentity is different from gender identity. By all accounts, a "GLBT" community shouldn't work. There's actually very little in common aside from wanting to sleep with people of the same gender, and thats not strictly true of the transgender people in the equation. But it does work, to an extent, because most people in all those groupings feel a sense of otherness, of not belonging. There are some things that other queer people can understand that even the most understanding straight friend can't. Thats not to say we should ghettoise ourselves - I have more straight male friends than gay ones - simply that there is a value in being able to share alienation. Saying that, to some extent the whole thing doesn't work. The (very) thinly veiled distaste I've seen displayed here and elsewhere for effeminate gay guys is symptomatic of that. "They're different". "They rock the boat". "They make things difficult for us people who act more normal". Which, I guess, is probably true. I personally find the whole wrist flap and feather boa mannerism a bit irritating but christ, most of my friends find at least half of what I do incredibly irritating, too. Whats the difference ibetween saying that people shouldn't be allowed to walk around in gold hot pants and wave pompoms and saying that dudes shouldnt be allowed to shag other dudes? When you get right down to it, there's no conceptual difference. If we can't deal with the idiosyncracies of people who's exclusion we've shared, how intolerant are we, really? Anyway, there we go, a few long winded thoughts from me. Like I said, I've enjoyed reading this discussion, so I think I'll be sticking around for a while :)

A different perspective here... First off, the Ryan who wrote One Life is quite clearly a better writer than the Ryan who started Kayden. Technically, its a better piece, and Kayden is good in its own right. The dialogue in One Life is smoother and more naturalistic, and I think the depth of description is better, too. So first off, congrats, Ry, for showing us all exactly what you can do. Second, the criticisms of the plot. Seems to me there were two core criticisms: The mean and nasty killing off of Jaylin, and the overly negative view of fem and/or promiscuous guys. While I think there is certainly some moralising going on about the value of casual sex vs a committed relationship, well... its a ROMANCE story. Its kinda about relationships, lol. In its own context, the favouring of relationships makes sense. As for the other two, well, I really think they just reflect reality. In my experience, most guys, gay or straight, are at least initially uncomfortable with fem guys. If that isnt the way you act, it takes a while to get used to. And thats all that happens in One Life: the gang is initially put off by Jem's charater, then when they realise hes actually a nice guy, they get over it. The last criticsm about the story can be broken down into two parts. First, the lack of foreshadowing about the death. Well, um, personal thing here, I HATE foreshadowing. Its almost universally clumsy, obvious, and ruins any novelty the climax of a book might have had. If I can tell whats going to happen after 20 pages of a book (and often it IS possible to do so), likelihood is I'm not going to enjoy the book. My view is that an author is under no obligation to warn people what's going to happen later on in a book, and in most cases to do so will weaken the strength of the writing. As for the death itself, well, people die. Its real. Gay kids die because of unaccepting families. Its real. Maybe not from their father shooting them at their wedding, but one of my friends did kill himself after his family was unable to accept him for who he was. I think, sometimes, we need stories to reflect unpleasant realities. Whether it be social prejudice against fem guys, or violent bigotry by the parents of gay kids. If we can always escape the violence of reality by reading a story with a happy ending, it somewhat blunts the drive to change that reality. We need writing like One Life to remind us that sometimes, "I love you" isn't enough to secure happiness. Sometimes the world intervenes. Good Job, Ryan. (Sorry for the long blah blah blah analysis, but hey, I've just spent 4 years of my life getting an English Lit degree. Might as well use it, hmmm?)