July 2000

Duck Soup

Homosexuality isn't funny. It really, truly isn't. It splits families, ruins careers and brings death death death long decades before due.

And in those same long decades we fought, opening our closets and our hearts. "This is me - this is the faggot fucker - take me or leave me, but for God's sake shut the fuck up!" We gave away our careers for honesty and openness - for the cause, you might say, and our families we abandoned before they abandoned us. Independence. There is no going back. The attitudes are fixed and impenetrable, and for all of our bleatings we can never do more than chip at them. Nor ever would we want to.

So we hold down respectable jobs, on purpose. We write for the respectable press, on purpose, and we have a reasoned argument and debate for all who wish to wrestle. Everything jogs along for many years, and the Port becomes known as a haven of oddness, yet tolerance and co-habitation. No come-on's are ever made - no advances to the unknown - no shitting in one's own nest.

Then along comes Bill. And shortly after, Ben. Forget decorum, girls - we're the boys to entertain YOU!!!

So now, within a couple of short years, all of what we worked for is undone. Homosexuality, which had become known as a perhaps unfortunate handicap - in the style of left-handedness, or maybe alopecia - but no hindrance to a good night and some good crack, is now relegated and degraded to the behaviour of the docks and the gutter. What was once intellect is replaced by simulated sex with a barstool. What was once hopeful reasoned discussion is now how good one looks with a Diana Ross wig on one's empty airhead.

The men love it of course. The drugged and drunken louts who would fuck an attractive beach bed find the whole thing hilarious. And Bill and Ben go home alone to their cats and dogs and snakes and empty beds, blissfully unaware of the damage they have done, and the painstaking work they have ruined.

There are none so blind as those who will not see...