20 AIDS killed our Angel Elders.....and the merits of good posture

Went to a concert last night and was fortunate enough to be in a conversation with the pianist/composer in the bar afterwards. One of his pieces was a composition written for a film called 'Killing Angels' which documented the death by AIDS of a network of friends. It was from back in the days when AIDS was guaranteed to kill. For the concert he'd decided to re-name the music because, he said, 'after all these years it no longer had a temporal connection to the film'. But as he was speaking about the film and the re-naming of the piece it struck me that as a community we're still reeling from the loss of what would have been our elders. A whole swathe of what would now have become seasoned and experienced friends and acquaintances are not there for us. Those that survived the plague are atypical. The generation that went before may have been too grief stricken with the loss of their younger peers that they would have been unprepared or unable to pass on their wisdom to the generation below. And then into this vulnerable and wounded community steps western consumerism with its conditional acceptance of the gay lifestyle. Conditional because of the need to be, and to stay, both young and fabulous. Conditional because of the need to spend on clothes, cosmetics, accessories, surgery to keep age at bay and to cultivate beautifulness. Conditional because it's your duty to be beautiful-if you want to be loved! All this means that my connection with the older generation is missing and there is a growing chasm between the young and the less young.

Anyway this week I was going to talk about posture!

I remember very clearly when I was in my teens being told by my parents and teachers not to slouch. Trouble was that bad posture was-well- 'cool' and good posture was associated with being a goody-goody-teacher's-pet type. In my generation the older girls at school were still having classes in 'deportment' where they would practice walking with books balanced on their heads as a way of learning correct posture. At the time this seemed very old fashioned and was seen by a generation of burgeoning feminists as a male chauvinistic controlling influence. Girls stopped taking domestic science classes and learning how to sew and look pretty. Bad posture was something like long hair for boys. Something that parents would complain to you about but it was your duty to rebel against. Slouching around with long hair was a badge of honor in the battle against the values of our parents' generation.

Sadly I'm now reaping the consequences of a lifetime of bad posture and, with chronic low back pain that just crept up on me over the years, I'm finally having to accept that the advice to stand up straight and to sit sensibly was not just nagging for the sake of just giving me a hard time. 

Thankfully, over several years, I'm beginning to unlearn some of my bad postural habits.

My advice to you now-young men- is, if you want to avoid years of crippling back pain, don't get to the stage where you've got to unlearn years of bad practice. And if someone wants to give you a present worth around £60 get them to buy you a couple of Alexander Technique sessions and get into the habit of doing some regular yoga, Pilates or Tai Chi.

By all means buy stuff and have a fabulous time but take time to look after your body and find some space to feed your soul!

19 GaySocrates- Seasoned Experience for Young Bucks

Just been doing some checking out of Socrates on Google and discovered a great translation of ‘The Apology’ which is Plato’s play describing the trial of Socrates ( http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html )

As we all know Socrates was a great Greek philosopher. I hadn’t realised that he didn’t write much but what we know of him was from the writings of his pupil Plato. The two philosophers were great lovers of men. Socrates was sentenced to drink poison following a trial where he was accused, and subsequently found guilty, of corrupting the youth of Athens.

I suppose Socrates is a bit of a hero to me since I too have a mission to corrupt the youth of my community!

Through writing this blog I’m becoming acutely aware of the power of language to defeat an argument before it’s even started. Initially I was thinking about a strap-line that included words like 'advice from someone older and wiser'. But how off-putting to a potential reader is that? The implication being that the writer is old and decrepit but also that the reader is lacking in wit.

I’m preferring the word 'seasoned' as opposed to 'older' implying, as it does, that through age something has been accumulated and there is now something more rather than something less!

Similarly ‘experienced’ doesn’t place a value judgement on what has been experienced. It’s avoiding saying ‘read this blog, it’s full of things you need to know and by not knowing them you’re a lesser person and by reading it you’re acknowledging that you’re in need of improving'.

I suppose I’m beginning to see that no matter how what I have to say is packaged, it will inevitably fail to reach its target audience.

So maybe I need to just accept that!

I know for sure that a former me in my 20s and 30s would have never thought to seek advice from an older man. In fact I would have been actively avoiding and extremely cautious about anything coming from anyone even remotely resembling my father. Young men, women and nurturing older men were the only people I would trust or pay attention to. Any older male with intellectual ideas and advice would be seen as immediately suspect.

But with the passage of time, I’ve managed to make my peace with my old father and now I’m more open not only to receiving ideas from the previous generation but also to transmitting ideas to the next generation.

I’ll be quite happy though if these musings are read by my own generation. Just as something to chew over or to identify with or to react against.

So what has my seasoned experience taught me that can be put in terms which wont just sound like a nagging broken record? That’s for me to perfect. I need to keep working on it J

Gay Wisdom-Handed Down the Generations-From Gaysocrates

Ok! So Brighton's very own Gay Community Listings Magazine-GSCENE - has kindly agreed to publish my musings as a monthly column!!

Many Thanks to the editor James Ledward

This is a sneak preview which will be published in the MAY edition...

 When my partner caught me googling “Gay Wisdom” he said “Isn’t gay wisdom stuff like NEVER WEAR CRIMPLENE TO A WEDDING?”

Hmm! Not sure entirely why, but about six months ago I started to crave something spiritual which wasn’t religious. I wondered if it would be possible to find an individual, or group who could help me ‘tend to the needs of my soul’. Now I’ve had some interesting debates with friends about whether there is a difference between mind and soul, and that’s for future columns, so if you can, just bear with me. I don’t mean soul in a conventional religious sense-whatever a turn-off that might mean to you. I mean soul in the sense of ‘who you truly are’ stripped of the expectations you have of yourself.

As the years go by and I grow longer in the tooth I’m increasingly aware of how difficult it can be to stay focused on being your true self. From birth most people are saddled with the hopes, dreams, expectations and vicarious aspirations of parental figures. Then come the rules and social expectations of school and friends. Most gay children will also have experienced the discomfort of growing up in the context of a homophobic religious belief system. Add to that the powerful messages bombarding us as adults from the media about what we should and shouldn’t be and do, the influence of friends and the expectations occurring within more intimate relationships and it’s not surprising that ‘who you truly are’ gets lost, confused, confounded and frustrated.

So I started to hunger for some guidance on how best to remain faithful to my true self!

I then became acutely aware that I was the oldest gay person I knew. There were no straightforward ways in my life to befriend any older gay guys who might be a source of that advice and guidance. At the same time I was beginning to feel more and more alienated from younger gay men who seemed to be coming from another world from me in terms of their attitudes and ideas. It was as if I existed in this hermetically sealed generation pod with little chance to connect meaningfully with gay men from younger or older generations and it didn’t seem right!

It seems that the scope for the giving and receiving of trans-generational advice within the gay community has become fairly limited for lots of reasons.

Sweeping legal changes and newly acquired relative equality before the law drives a chasm of difference between young and old. Media youth adulation reinforces a culture of ageism. The ‘internetification’ of social networking means that young and old will only cross paths if an old guy subtracts 15-20 years off his gaydar profile!

So in the absence of a forum I began to blog (check it out at tinyurl.com/gaywisdom)

Where are the Gay Sages of Brighton? Please speak to me!

And to Gay Youth I ask, “What do you need of your elders?”

Contact me at

Email me! 

18 Gay Youth. Is there anyone out there?

For some reason I’ve started to balk against the concept of ‘giving advice to the gay youth of today’ I’m finding that there’s negativity sweeping into my attitude. Like I’ve stopped feeling philanthropic and the misanthrope is getting the better of me!

What’s the point of trying to help those who don’t want help? Are they beyond help? Am I beyond being able to help?

Then yesterday I had a shaft of enlightenment during which I became aware of my disdain towards a younger friend who was monopolising attention with his youthful charm. The penny then dropped for me that this sourness I’m feeling is a kind of internalized homophobia but not quite! Maybe a dash of internalized homophobia mixed with a dislike of characteristics that were very pronounced in me when I was in my own youth. On reflection I was highly narcissistic and that was my defence from feeling bad, wrong dirty, unacceptable and invalidated-stripped of my spiritual foundations and desperate for acceptance by at least someone, somewhere.

In a community idealizing youthful good looks I could happily nestle myself into an appreciative coterie and avoid those older and wiser who maybe could see through the defences covering my insecurities.

I gorged myself on the appreciative-ness of others, which, was intoxicatingly addictive. I wouldn’t however have been capable of responding to someone feeling older, or less attractive, or ready for some validation in another sphere or along a different axis.

I was simply overpowered by the seductive influence of my charm and its capacity to satisfy my bulimic appetite for being appreciated physically and sexually. And of course there was the power of testosterone fuelling the process so that the supremacy of sexual satisfaction over friendship, over a desire for mentorship, over more substantial and sustained relationships, ensured that once the testosterone had declined and once the damage of the past had had been healed so I didn’t feel quite so bad or so wrong or so dirty or so unacceptable or so invalidated, I can now survey my social arena and understand why there is now an arid scrubland with only one or two substantial friendships having been able to survive the harsh and inhospitable conditions of my capacity to sustain them.

So maybe there are swathes of gay youth being propelled through their existence wounded by society’s homophobia but insightful enough to their defences that they are prepared to put down their armour and risk exploring what’s going on for the sake of a more enriched and substantial life experience. But then again-maybe there aren’t!