Todd Karehana used to pull out his eyelashes and scratch up his face to look more masculine, after being teased at school for looking like a girl. Now in his mid-20s, he’s realised that “being masculine doesn’t mean you have to wear staunch clothes and grunt at people. It’s just being who you are.” Continue reading »
Coping successfully with older age is something that 78-year-old Rob Calder does remarkably well, although he laughs that he still has days when he wants to lie in bed with the blankets over his head. There is much that senior gay men, and indeed those of us who are younger, can learn from how he has set up his life. Continue reading »
Gay men have no style because we are original, as individuals. Each one of us has our own stories, our own lives, and our own favourite item of clothing. For some it’s the suit they wear to work. For others, it’s the Collingwood jersey they wear to the pub. And yes, for some it’s the tight glittery singlet that makes their nipples stand out. Continue reading »
As the world tumbles further into the abyss of the body makeovers age, with the endless parade of before and after pictures, I find myself concluding that in the gay world life is equally difficult whether you’re Mr Before or Mr After. Continue reading »
“Tied Up” is the name of an excellent but little-known Olivia Newton-John single from 1982. We’re both tied up in promises. Hers is something to do with love, mine is the promise of a Windsor knot. I don’t know how I’ve managed to reach the age of nearly 35 without knowing how to tie a … Continue reading »
My new documentary Men Like Us opens in Auckland this Thursday. One of the nine wonderful guys featured in it, 30-year-old Raymond Wilson, talks about the struggles he had throughout his 20s with body image. For a decade, he was a twink in a bear’s body, unable and unwilling to accept that he naturally had … Continue reading »
[I'm returning to a Monday-Friday publishing schedule as of today. This is a piece originally written for The Good Men Project back in June to celebrate gay pride. Given my move in a few days to Melbourne, I thought it an appropriate time to republish this here.] I’ve now moved three times to avoid the … Continue reading »
The last time I interviewed Patrick Graham was some years ago. He’d just directed an extraordinarily funny and clever adaptation of “The Comedy of Errors” for an outdoor Summer Shakespeare season. “It’s a pretty broad, knockabout farce that I knew would appeal to an audience that wasn’t necessarily Shakespearean scholars,” he told me at the … Continue reading »
I’ve always loved alter-egos. As an only child, I had an active imagination, and often made up games that were mind-scripted adventures into other worlds where I would take on other characters. I was strongly drawn to drama as I was growing up, but more from the writing side than the performing, because I didn’t … Continue reading »
Despite much progress over the years, there are still many men who appear to live in mortal terror of being sodomised, as if such things happened randomly in the street like beestings. As a warning to their fellow neurotic brothers, they often feel the need to point out potential danger situations where, but for the … Continue reading »
