Guest Post: 13 greatest gay movie characters

Welcome to Blog Swap Tuesday, a new and possibly entirely irregular feature of this website. And what better way to kick it off then with the words of the terrifyling talented Maria. Maria and I are what the web would call 'real life friends' because we used to work together at a newspaper. She is currently their uber-awesome film journalist and has made a habit of kicking her round in the balls. If you challenge her to a movie duel, she will win. I don't know anybody who has their niche covered to this extreme.

Maria writes her own blog on the side of her ridiculous work hours, covering everything movie related for those of us like me who can't be arsed doing their own research and for those of us like me who don't have access to interviews with directors, writers and actors from across the freaking world. She even let me tag along once to meet Ryan Kwanten because her heart is made of candy. If you do not go and read/follow her blog I will place a curse upon both your houses. That shit is talented. Anyway, without further ado, read her guest post for me about the 13 greatest gay movie characters.

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Gays in cinema have come a long way from being used as the butt of jokes, where their key purpose was to be a device for other characters to point at and go `he he he look, it’s a faggot’. Sure, the clichés still remain, but modern filmmakers have developed stories that are less about being gay and more about the issues associated with that i.e. sexual identity, freedom and that universal theme love. Within those films some truly memorable characters have been created, like Tom Hanks as Andrew Beckett in Philadelphia and Tom Cruise as Maverick in Top Gun. Here’s 13 of the best gay movie characters:

George (Colin Firth), A Single Man

What’s not to love about love? Fashion designer Tom Ford took us on a visually stunning and moving exploration of love and the way it changes us in his directorial debut A Single Man. In the role that should have nabbed him the career Oscar (Jeff Bridges in A Crazy Heart? Really?) Colin Firth plays a college professor in the 1960s grieving the loss of his long time partner (Matthew Goode). Over the course of the day, he begins to come to terms with his broken heart and rediscover his passion for life through experiences with strangers (Nicholas Hoult, Jon Kortajarena) and old friends (Julianne Moore).

Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), The Rocky Horror Picture Show

You know, the great thing about Dr. Frank-N-Furter is that people in small towns (cough Boonah cough) think this is actually what all gays are like. Of course it’s true - they all sing, dress in drag and make their very own 6ft tall, bronzed love slave for kicks. In other news, Tim Curry has never been better as the Sweet Transvestite from Trannnnnnnsexual Transylvania.

Neil (Joseph Gordon Levitt), Mysterious Skin

There’s a lot of things I could say about Neil: he’s angry, damaged and destructive, all for reasons he can’t forget or get over. But he’s also enchanting and beautiful, much like Gordon-Levitt himself. However, Neil’s best friend Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg) sums it up best:

“You don't have to tell me, I was infatuated with him too once. But I know all Neil's secrets and there's shit there you don't even want to know about. Trust me. Once I'm gone, you'll be all Neil has and you have to understand one thing. Where normal people have a heart, Neil McCormick has a bottomless black hole. And if you don't watch out, you c an fall in and get lost forever.”

Wallace Wells (Kieran Culkin), Scott Pilgrim Vs The World

Easily the best gay cinematic gay character of the year, easily. Biting wit? Check. Bone dry sense of humour? Check check. Sarcastic charm? Check check check. Shares a bed with multiple men? Yeah, you know where I’m going with this. The beautiful thing about Scott Pilgrim’s `cool gay roommate’ is that in the transition from comic to screen, he didn’t lose any of the intelligence and humour which made him oh-so-beloved by fans of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series. This is largely thanks to the spot on performance by Kieran Culkin and screenwriters keeping most of Wallace’s brilliant one-liners in the screenplay. My favourite: “Kick her in the balls!” Also noteworthy: “Okay, presumably, you may have just seen a dude's junk, and I'm very sorry for that... so is he.”

Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), Brokeback Mountain

Ah, the role that should have won Heath Ledger his first Oscar. Sure, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of Truman Capote was amazing, however, it was more obvious, unrestrained and flamboyant while Ledger was tormented, complex and understated. He got across the beautiful complexities of his love with Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) with what he didn’t say and the shadow of emotions as they flickered across his face. Despite the comedic outpouring that has followed the movie (“oh hey, don’t get all Brokeback on me man” etc etc) Brokeback Mountain is not a film about two gay cowboys – it’s just a sad, epic love story.

Adam/Felicia (Guy Pearce), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen Of The Dessert

Possibly my favourite `gay’ movie ever, this Australian charmer gives us a glimpse behind the drag queen guise to see the real people within. And by people, I mean fabulous, extravagant queens! While Tick/Mitzi (Hugo Weaving) and Bernadette (Terrence Stamp) each brought something different to the table, or bus as it was in this case, it was Adam/Felicia who stole the show. Loud and proud, Pearce’s character is a force of nature and one of the most unrelenting homosexual characters on screen. When he was surrounding by backwards attitudes in homophobic small towns in the Australian outback, what does he do? Walks through the streets dressed in full drag. But his best moment is the iconic scene where he sits atop the bus as it drives through the desert, with the wind trailing an enormous silver train behind him while lip-synching opera. Lets not forget his blunt throwaway lines that popped up more often than their cattle rods in sparkly lycra hotpants: “The only life I saw for the last million miles were the hypnotized bunnies. Most of them are now wedged in the tires.”

Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), Milk

For someone who’s such a snarly, self-involved bastard, the vibrancy and joy for life Sean Penn managed to portray in Harvey Milk is simply astounding and well-worth his second Oscar. Also, James Franco swims naked in a pool. If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to see the Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, the accuracy and humanity of Penn’s performance is incredible. Milk was the first openly gay official elected into public office in America and what stays with you long after the credits role, be

sides the tragic circumstances of his death, is although he was unsure of himself, of his actions and substance as a human – he fought for what he believed in. He fought for it passionately. Much like the people who were involved in the film, namely openly gay director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. In fact, Black’s acceptance speech when he took out the Oscar for best screenplay in 2008 remains one of the most powerful and moving moments in the awards history (watch the video below). Did I mention James Franco swims naked in a pool?

Patrick `Kitten’ Braden (Cillian Murphy), Breakfast On Pluto

Those eyes, those lips . . .Cillian Murphy’s angelic features have never been put to such divisive use as they were playing a transgender lad who leaves his small Irish town for adventures in London during the 70s. Kitten is simply such a fascinating and fragile character, you can’t help but be drawn in to the complexities of his life and identity largely thanks to an absolutely draw-dropping performance from Murphy.

Armand and Albert Goldman (Robin Williams and Nathan Lane), The Bird Cage

`What? Two characters from the one movie? That’s cheating!’ That’s also called counting and seriously, how do you choose between these two characters? The answer: you can’t. I like to think of them as the perfect couple, yin and yang, the fact that they’re gay is really an afterthought. The proud parents are so comfortable with each other and accustomed to their own antics, it’s their interactions with others that will have you gut-laughing like Roman Polanski watching A Clockwork Orange.

Mr Garrison (Trey Parker) South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut

One of the best South Park characters got some of the best fleeting moments in the film, despite the absence of his better half Mr Slave. Never fear, Mr Garrison got to be just as big, long and uncut as the rest of the cast and that double entendre. Best line? “I'm Sorry Wendy, but I don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.”

Zachary (Marc-Andre Grondin), C.R.A.Z.Y

This little-seen French film has become a foreign language favourite on my radar and follows five brothers over the course of several Christmases. The main protagonist is Zachary (Marc-Andre Grondin), a sensitive and artistically orientated kid-teenager-adult who struggles to fit in with his family, namely his traditional father. As the years pass, we go on a journey with him as he discovers his sexual identity and tries to come to terms with it.

Truman Capote (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), Capote

With the mannerisms of a gentleman, the wardrobe of Tom Hardy and the voice of a five-year-old girl dropped down a well, Truman Capote was always going to be as mesmerizing on screen as he was off. Seymour Hoffman cemented his place as one of Hollywood’s greatest character actors with this role which in turn led us inside the mind and workings of a troubled literary genius. Also worth a mention is Toby Jones, who also plays Capote in the unfortunately timed film Infamous which was literally about exactly the same period in the author’s life. As someone who has always teetered on the border of premature midget and hobbit, this was a rare leading role for Jones and one that he performed with gusto. Although Capote got the Oscar kudos, Infamous is the better film and features the extra punch of Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee and Daniel Craig as the (also gay) murderer Perry Smith.

Ari (Alex Dimitriades), Head On

Everyone’s favourite Aussie-Greek Alex Dimitriades plays a 19-year-old in Melbourne, as he struggles with his sexual identity through various homosexual and heterosexual encounters. Raw, gritty and urban, Head On is a tough film but nothing compared to the source material Loaded, a novel by Christos Tsiolkas, which is one of the most potent forms of gay literature I’ve read.

Josie, wonderdog

This is a story for anyone who has ever loved a pet.

When I was barely able to form memories, my brother was given a blue heeler pup who he creatively named Puppity. She was the Queen of the Outback and essentially the greatest hound in all of the west. Once she saved me from almost certain death when I went walkabout and got stuck in waist deep mud and water in a creek surrounded by thousands of cattle trampling through the area.

I was a kilometre away from the homestead and mum could not hear my screams, but Puppity could. She came and she guarded me against being mushed underfoot and eventually roused the attention of my mum, who was unaware I had even left the house.

And one day Puppity was run over by the mail truck. I was too young to really understand what had happened but my brother was so taken with her loss that we asked my Uncle and Auntie for another blue heeler pup, from the same mother. And so it was that we had Josie delivered to our door, a tiny bundle of blue-grey who pined and pined for at least the first week as she slept outside.

She grew quickly into the role of our sidekick as we roamed the cattle station far and wide. She learned to ride pillion on the motorbikes as we mustered cattle and leapt into any ute tray at the first hint of a command. She fought a brown snake and lived to tell the tale, stepping in between it and my brother as he was out in a paddock.

Josie was there with me, looking into the car servicing pit, the day my brother received burns to most of his body in a terrible accident. She whimpered and pawed and ran around in circles, so clearly traumatised by the pain her master was in. How was a dog to know that someone is in pain? I still don’t know. But her understanding was palpable.

She was there in the back of the ute when we transported him, skin hanging like sheets from his arms, to the Royal Flying Doctor Service at the homestead’s airstrip. She watched him, with me, as the plane took off for Brisbane and wondered when he would be back again.

She was there when my baby sister was born, even though she didn’t particularly know what to do with the tiniest, most vulnerable of things. So she just stared at the bassinet and occasionally made it bounce with her paw. Transfixed.

She was there when my parent’s marriage fell apart and we packed all our worldly belongings into a truck bound for Charleville. She was there when I needed to hug something while pretending that I was OK. She couldn’t talk or speak but it didn’t matter. She had these big eyes that had already been by our side for so long.

She was riding in the passenger seat when my mum’s brother hired a Thrifty truck and drove our worldly possessions the 759km to what would become our new home. She bit and slobbered and yapped at the passing air for every single one of those 759km.

She was in our yard just outside of our new home where she barked at every passing ute. Not car, just utes, remnants of our previous life.

She was there when I graduated from Year 7, when my sister started school, when my brother graduated from high school, when I started high school, when my sister graduated from primary school and started high school and when I left year 12 in 2004. She was there at family meals and in front of the television.

She was there when we got Rosie, the miniature fox terrier, and seemed so terribly unenthused with the idea of her heels being in a perpetual state of being nipped.

Her hearing went first. She stopped coming when she was called but those big eyes kept seeing the world go buy. Our lives, go by. And then her sight went and the only sensations she had left were touch, taste and smell. There may have been little indication that we were in the room, to her, but a simple pat on the back would send her tail motoring in spasms of wagging.

And then she had trouble walking. She began sleeping inside when her senses went, so she could be close to us whenever she needed. But we lived a long way upstairs so when her movement became shaky and she took a tumble down several stairs we began the final mission.

Each bathroom visit we would pick her up, heft her in our arms and walk her down the back steps like a scene from the canine Bodyguard remake. And we would carry her back up the stairs. We did this up to three times a day for a year.

Talk would turn to putting her to sleep. Her quality of life was slipping and it would be the easy way for her to go. But we couldn’t do it on account of those nights curled up together when a hand placed on her head would make her happy. And that tail would wag.

She was 17 when she passed away two years ago on boxing day.

She ambled over to the food bowl, took a bite of dinner and then laid down on her side. Mum was there with her as her breaths became at once ragged and shallow. She held her paw and she kept holding it for another 10 minutes until Josie finally slipped from the world.

She was our partner in crime and happiness for every year I had been alive bar four. She was a link to our former life and she had been through everything our family had been through. She loved us unconditionally and we loved her. I never knew that type of love could exist for a pet but it can and it does.

A dog can never really know how much they help by providing the love that they do. But I hope she did, in those final moments as we held her paw, have even the tiniest of inklings that we adored her and that she could never be replaced.

The very nearly lonely Christmas

So, on Christmas Day Santa Claus left me a hangover and a ridiculous travel schedule in pouring rain, which is about as festive as a besser block. I was tired and I had five litres of wine in my duffel bag which, I'll admit, is enough to stop a bull elphant from a thousand paces.

One of the units of wine was a 2L cask which my hilarious friends had wrapped in booby pictures from a men's titty mag so it's not like I could even whip it out in public to have a sip. Incidentally, these are the same friends who sent me two lots of the same postcard of naked men back from Cairns, not realising the post card would rock up similarly in the buff at the extremely local Post Office of my small home town where I was a regular visitor.

I could imagine the people now, spying me as I walked in. Hey, that's the guy who had all the cocks in the mail!

Anyhow, my booby-trapped wine was the least of my dramas as I caught the train back to Brisbane where my family were going to meet me, having driven from hometown. You see, there was lots of rain and this meant the road connecting hometown and absolutely anywhere else was completely underwater.

With no access to family and all my friends with theirs my Christmas was shaping up to be a slightly more adult-oriented Home Alone style adventure where nobody robs me and I sit at home drinking 5 litres of wine on my own while waiting for my family to hitch a lift on a swamp boat to come and rescue me from terrible aftershave movie moments and a future as a washed up child actor.

To celebrate the news that I was going to be spending Christmas alone - and that my presents, too, were flooded in - I opened the fridge of my uncleaned apartment and found a leftover pizza which I promptly inhaled like it was ventolin. Seeing as there would be no Christmas lunch I may as well make all my terrible food choices at 10.30am, right?

As it turns out, I received a phone call from my family just seconds after lifting the last pizza morsel from a crease in my t-shirt and into my mouth informing me that the back highway was still open and they were coming, albeit the very long way around, but they were coming.

I stared at the empty pizza box and cried for having ruined my upcoming lunch.

We made it to the festivities and carried on all night aided by merriments and the rivers of wine in my bag.

Driving back this morning, in torrential rain and along 3 hours of highways, was a real test of whatever leftover Christmas spirit we had because my mother is an abominable backseat driver and exceedingly nervous on any road that is more than 10km away from hometown.

At one point, as I was taking an exit, she screamed at me to stop because the roadwork sign made it looked like the road was blocked off even though there was rather clearly a road easing off into the distance. I noticed this despite the incessant rain.

She is also like an audiobook for speed signs, providing a constant soundtrack the entire way home of '80...100...70...100...80...70...60...sign says reduce speed Rick'. Even after I requested that, if she really had a problem with her gut feeling that I was speeding she should first check the speedometer and, if she finds cause for alarm, she should broach the subject with me, she still muttered the speed signs under her breath.

But we made it. And I didn't deliberately steer the car into a tree, so, hey, tiny miracles indeed.

PS: I like my family. I just like writing about their idiosyncracies even more.

Sell it, and they will buy

I’m not a huge fan of shitty sales techniques.

This is mostly because they work obscenely well on me. I am the type of person who could walk into a beauty salon and leave with a camel because it’s good for my skin, only to find out much later that I didn’t get the moisturiser I needed and now I have a fucking camel.

I went to a store recently the name of which shall remain anonymous suffice to say it sold cotton things and I bought a shirt. And the man behind the counter, who looked like he had sidled out of a Disney film where he played the villain, asked me ever so nicely whether I would like a $5 cotton thing which was hanging on a rack.

Now I wasn’t to know what this thing was or did. It was big and it was red and it was made of cotton. And it was five dollars. Fucking score! My act of purchasing this mysterious thing amounted to an act of transferring the five dollar red, cotton thing from the rack in the store to a rack in my home where it sits and has gotten, I must say, quite good at being a five dollar red thing made of cotton.

I hope one day to discover, as the rafters in my home collapse in a fire started after a failed cooking experiment, that this five dollar red, cotton thing is actually a handy, fire retardant blanket but this is wishful thinking. In the meantime, anybody who looks in my wardrobe might consider me very cosmopolitan indeed, for making such a daring purchase of a thing whose function is as yet undetermined.

I’ll pretend that I glanced its meritorious properties from far across the room without, say, the store attendant foisting it on me because he had a quota to fill of red thing sales.

This is why I hate shitty sales techniques.

A technologically disinclined friend was swept into a phone store against her will the other day, something about Christmas and not wanting to see the children cry, and opted to purchase a phone on a pre-paid plan and walked out of there with a phone on a post-paid plan because the store attendant had mentioned something about fire and brimstone.

Of course, there is a lot to be said for fighting back. This is why, next time I have to brave the stores I know not much about, I will burst in on a cloud of my own confidence and demand silence from the sales attendants. If they try and look me in the eye, I will snarl like a caged puppy.

A Twitter friend (still feel like such a loser writing that, even though some of you are classy specimens) and I were just having a discussion about the origins of the term ‘lemon’ when it comes to being sold a dud car.

I have every reason to believe it dates back to the age of the first cars when a man possessed of great fortune (but not in want of a wife) ambled on over to a newly sprung car dealership having read about these new fandangled horseless carriages and asked to buy one.

The sales assistant, with no experience whatsoever in mechanics, looks for the nearest object and hands the wealthy man a lemon. The wealthy man seems notably chuffed with his purchase and goes home, discovering sometime later what a real car actually looks like and remembering from his days as a ships captain what the feck a lemon is.

The autobiographical detail in those last few paragraphs, save for the odd touch of hyperbole, is really quite embarrassing.

Excuse me while I go warm up my camel.*

*This is really a phrase that should never again be written.

Ho ho hum

Christmas for me was marred the very day I was point blank informed by my brother that Santa Claus was an elaborate construct designed by parents the world over to subjugate their children.

He didn’t really use those words – he was nine – but the intent was rather similar and, to be honest, I’ve wanted to shoot out the speakers that play Jingle Bells around December every year since.

But it wasn’t just the revelation of the ruse that ruined it for me, but the subsequent years of my parent’s divorce that installed somewhere deep within me the core elements of the Grinch.

I would alternate Christmas holidays between my mother and my father, one year opening presents that my mother had scrimped and saved desperately for that were on par with all the other kids and the other holed up on an enormous cattle station with my father who didn’t believe I had asthma because he didn’t think it was a real thing.

I was all of eight. His Christmas spirit had ebbed away many years beforehand so I guess it was kind of nice to see him make last minute efforts to tinsel the fuck out of the house in honour of my fairly specific demands.

Of course, he didn’t really have any tinsel (because why the fuck?) and he didn’t even have a Christmas tree. That there were any trees able to grow nearby was somewhat of a Christmas miracle anyhow. So one particular festive season he ripped a large branch from a gum tree towering outside and propped it up in the living room before cutting out the Santa-face-cardboard-baubles from the Coca Cola deluxe can pack. And that was that.

Gum trees, you’ll note, are highly combustible as they store fuels in their leaves. And so it was one unfortunate lonesome match ignited the most festive Outback Christmas display I had ever enjoyed, forcing my good tidings up in smoke like it was itself a metaphor for every Christmas I had never enjoyed.

Were it not for the cack-handed attempts at yuletide in the Outback, Christmas out west is a phenomenally beautiful affair as the sun lingers long into the night and thumps down on the horizon in a splash of brilliant reds, pinks and orange before diving out of sight and sucking the warmth from the air. The silence is exquisite.

When those Christmases ended, we began spending the others with my mother’s family and my beautiful Grandma at the nursing home she had been entered into. Despite the best efforts of family and the charming crack of bon bons, I was still a child in a nursing home confronted with a scenario I felt guilty about feeling depressed about.

My chronic asthma attacks had forced upon me an unusual preoccupation with death, as a child. Not in a fascinating way. I was scared at any moment that I would stop breathing. I’d heard my mum talking about it in whispers one night to an Aunt and the phrase ‘he could stop breathing at any moment’ buried itself into my subconscious. And so it was that the nursing home scared the hell out of me.

But we celebrated Christmas there every year, donning the plastic and coloured party hats as the thinnest of veneers to ward off unseasoned thoughts. Thoughts that, at any rate, one of the lovely residents mightn’t be there next Christmas. Or next week.

Christmas, for me in my youth, was associated with the bleak. Always the pretence of celebrations because it was what the holiday demanded of us. And the bon-bon jokes were simply terrible. The only redeeming factor was my mother’s recipe of YumYums, which are rum balls without the rum. Sacrilege, perhaps, but they are a divine and devilishly easy creation that we refused to make except in the week before Christmas. YumYums consumed at any other time of year would be an affront against all that is good in the world.

So I channelled the very best of the Scrooge-mentality, roaming freely across the land and bah-humbugging to my heart’s content. I shook my fist at the ever earlier erection of Christmas displays in department stores (“This absolutely will not stand!”) and I renamed all the reindeer after inappropriate words because it made me feel better and, let’s face it, ‘Fucken’ is phonetically at least fairly similar to ‘Blitzen’. And I’d walk around the house yelling ‘EGGNOG? Eggnog can go fuck itself’.

My sister is seven years younger than me and she’s never known our dad. It started as me pretending to be Santa Claus in the wee hours of the morning and ended with myself in a career while she was still in school. And there it was. The magic of Christmas. I could afford to get her the best presents going around, indulge her – for that sliver of a slice of margin of time in December – with presents and my time and my attention, swap gossip stories, do each other’s hair.

And watching her face as she opens those presents is honestly the best feeling in the world. I don’t have kids. I’m not a father. But now I know how it feels, to hand over oodles of gift-wrapped presents as a silent nod and a wink to the fact that we are family, that we would damned well do anything for each other.

That’s Christmas.

The tiniest of excuses

Today's blog post was eaten by a pegasus.

Stay tuned tomorrow for a post that couldn't have been written on Twitter.

I bite my thumb at thee

"The inspiration was right there in front of me the entire time."

To lighten the mood a little bit, I am going to discuss a song that has possessed me of the remarkable need to claw into my own skull and rescue my brain. If the scratch marks on the inside of my cranium are not hint enough of the song I mean, allow me to clue you in.

I whip my hair. Back and forth.

Now, far be it for me to judge the achievements of a child star who wasn't even born in the retro 20th Century, but when ten year olds start gawping on about 'pulling up in rides' I find it just a mite comical. But there is a deeper motif to her lyrics, I can tell. A real commentary on western greed and haters running like a ribbon of truth through the verses. Here is what I heard.

I whip my hair back and forth
I whip my hair back and forth (just whip it)
I whip my hair back and forth
I whip my hair back and forth (whip it real good)
I whip my hair back and forth
I whip my hair back and forth
I whip my hair back and forth
I whip my hair back and forth

Her hair must be whipped backward and forward. She would like you to do the same. This is important as, prior to the civil war and the abolition of slavery, the whipping of hair was considered to be a pronouncement of one's liberty. Indeed, the original intent of the French was to build the Statue of Liberty as a mechanically adjustable bronze goliath so that the grand old madame of the Harbour could indeed whip her hair, in case the overtones of liberty were not already self-evident.

Hop about the place turn my swag on
Pay no attention to them haters cuz we whip em off
and we ain't doing nothing wrong
so don't tell me nothing, i'm just tryna have fun
so keep the party jumping

I don't even know what turning a swag on means. The haters are back. Nobody ever really clarified where they were coming from. In any case, this is a verse about stability, where the 'party' is clearly an elaborate metaphor for 'the economy' and really Willow is trying to make the voters understand that we escaped a recession and a double dip recession because our fiscal policy was not allowed to be hated on. Which is why our economy must continue to 'jump' where jump is also a synonym for 'go upwards like'. Or something.

so whats up (yea)
And I'll be doing what to do
we turn our back
and whip our hair and just shake them off
shake them off, shake them off,shake them off

Although not yet medically proven, whipping one's hair can indeed be a good way to shake things off. Assuming your hair is of a length that would make Rapunzel give up hope. This is an allegory about the value of sovereignty and national self-determination.

Don't let haters keep me off my grind
Keep my head up i know I'll be fine
Keep fighting until i get there
When i'm down and i feel like giving up i think again

You know, somebody really ought to do something about those haters. They keep coming back and nobody seems to know where they live. Alas, Willow is on her grind and shall not be removed. And, as if in poetry sent from heaven itself, she expresses succinctly the attributes of not giving up.

I whip my hair back and forth
I whip my hair back and forth (just whip it)
I whip my hair back and forth
I whip my hair back and forth (whip it real good)
I whip my hair back and forth
I whip my hair back and forth (just whip it)
I whip my hair back and forth
I whip my hair back and forth (whip it real good)
I whip my hair back and forth
I whip my hair back and forth (just whip it)
I whip my hair back and forth
I whip my hair back and forth (whip it real good)
I whip my hair back and forth
I whip my hair back and forth
I whip my hair back and forth
I whip my hair back and forth

Fuck it. I give up.

The Big List of Reasons Why You're Wrong About Asylum Seekers

If you listen to the naysayers, and there are many who frequently say nay, there are roughly four things that have the capacity to end the world. Those are the gays, nuclear weapons, Amy Winehouse and asylum seekers.

There. I said it.

And I wonder whether they still believed it yesterday when a boat carrying some 80-100 refugees was smashed on to the rocks in churning seas at Christmas Island, like it was some kind of horrific metaphor for the welcome we extend them if they do happen to make it to shore. Those who have politicised the plight of asylum seekers, who claimed previously that we have offered the ‘red carpet’ to these folk have yet to clarify their remarks in the wake of the tragedy yesterday.

Well, those at the top of the tree anyhow. If you’re like me and you hate yourself, then you were probably listening to talkback radio and the views of those safely ensconced in their suburban lifestyles telling us we should ‘send them back’ and that ‘they got what they deserved’. Because apparently asylum seekers are broken Christmas fob watches with return policies.

The arguments some people use to solidify mass ignorance, are, however a little bit wrong. Or a lot wrong, depending on your ability to estimate spatial entities. Helpfully, I have compiled a little list of the most common arguments against asylum seekers which I am calling ‘The Big List of Reasons You’re Wrong About Asylum Seekers’.

1. They’re illegal! Aha, our criminal justice system will protect our prejudice!

I don’t quite know how to put this, so I’m going to go with a simple: no. They’re not illegal. They’re not any more illegal than that moustache you grew ironically last October. Both Australian and International Law allows those seeking asylum from persecution in their countries to seek it. That includes on our shores. Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also backs this up. And yes, they’re still allowed to seek asylum if they have no documents. Now, what you’re referring to as ‘illegals’ are people who overstay their Visas. There are thousands of these, mostly people from Western Countries who got sozzled in a backpacker bar and missed their connection flight back to Oxford.

2. They’re queue jumpers, look at them deftly skipping that queue!

I want you to show me, on a map of the world, where this queue is. Even if there was a queue, you’re missing the point. Let me put it this way. If you’re being chased by your worst nightmare – mine would be spandex bike shorts – and that nightmare can or will kill you, where do you run? Maybe you have two options. In one you have to cross many borders before finally boarding a boat that isn’t really a boat and hoping that maybe it’ll hold together until you get to a country that will probably lock you up when you get there anyway. The other option is to sit patiently in a queue, like you would at a bank before making a withdrawal. Except at the bank you won’t die. You see, in the queue you will get caught and persecuted and shot and killed or any combination of the above. You might die on a boat too, but what choice do you have? It’s a moot point anyway as in places like Iraq and Iran, where most of yesterday’s asylum seekers were from, Australia has no diplomatic representation and there is no standard queue to wait patiently in. What would you do?

3. But they’re just boat people!

Boat people? Sounds like a race of creatures that look predominantly like boats. This phrase is terribly disingenuous. They’re not boat people, they’re fleeing from horrific persecution and terrible lives. Show some respect.

4. Well, what if they come and steal our jobs?

You mean the jobs that you don’t want to do? In any case, accepting people into this country who want to work to make a better life for them and their families is good for the economy. They create demand, they will shop, they will spend money on other industries. Some will go on to study to be doctors like the great Victor Chang, others will pack fruit at the local markets. Research has shown the benefit to the US economy of all ‘illegal’ immigrants is some $800 billion. So, even if you don’t have a heart, the economic windfalls of granting asylum are robust to say the least.

5. Well, they won’t work, they’ll just sit on welfare and drain our resources.

There is absolutely no evidence to suggest this has happened, or will happen. There will be some, as there are in our own ‘culture’ where your cousin Ted spends too much time gurgling bong water and adjusting his crotch throughout the day.

6. We take too many refugees anyway, why let even more in?

I have a feeling that you would still say this when we take just one refugee. As it turns out, Australia takes about one refugee for every 1600 people. In Britain that number is one for every 600 and in Tanzania – the beacon of the developed world *cough* - they take one for every 75. These figures are from the turn of the 21st Century. And that’s all refugees – not just those who come by boat. We took fewer refugees this year than there were residents in my home shire – 14,000. And really people, I grew up in the sticks.

7. But they’re all Muslims!

Quick, everybody hide! Seriously, what the hell is your point? If what you really meant to say was ‘they’re all terrorists’ you are also wrong. The amount of refugees sent home due to character references, out of the 14,000 odd we take each year, is almost in the single digits. Are there bad apples? Yes. There were bad apples in my Year 12 class as well. No, really, some of those people were dicks.

8. If we just stopped the boats tragedies like this wouldn’t happen.

Equivalent: If we stopped the murderers we would have no more murders. Or: Why false logic has ripped our hearts out. First, those aren’t just boats. There are people on them. Those people need a home safe from danger. We can give them that. Secondly, if you manage to stop the boats then I also have a Rancor in my basement that needs feeding.

9. “If people are stupid enough to risk their live in leaky boats it's not my problem.”

That’s an actual comment on a news website. I truly think my cat understands more about this issue than this person does. And my cat tried to eat its dinner through an unopened can.

10. They should shut the back door to Australia and make them catch planes.

Please see all arguments above.


Disclaimer: I am not a refugee. I once sailed on a boat but it was quite nice and I did it on a lake and there was only a slight breeze. I have lived a fairly good life. I’ve never wanted for anything and my family has taught me the value of a ‘fair go’ and hard work. Once, I stood on a nail. It hurt a lot, but that is probably the most physical pain I have ever been in. The greatest threat to my life as a child was that nail in that sandpit. Today, it is driving through the city to get to my friend’s house because I am a bad driver and changing lanes scares me.

I will leave this country one day, on a plane, to go work overseas because I can. And I will probably spend a lot of my money on alcohol and cigarettes while pretending I am being very cultured. This is not the case for refugees who are forced to flee heart-stopping terror in their own countries in search of a better place. Australia could be that better place if we opened our hearts and our eyes. Currently, we can sit back and watch a boat of asylum seekers break apart on the rocks and admonish them for being silly. But we don’t know the exact kind of horror they have had to flee. We will never know it and therefore it is very easy for us not to care, or to send them back with the receipt.

Granting asylum to those desperate is not going to change the way you live your life. It might enhance our culture, like immigrants did in the decades before us, and it might boost our economy but you’re more than welcome to continue whatever it is that you were doing, and have been doing, for the decades these asylum seekers have been turning up in the tiny numbers that they do.

Problem solved.

And here's one we prepared earlier

The United Nations does not have a special envoy in charge of who the aliens should first meet should they ever make contact with Planet Earth. There is nobody in charge of the official reception, choosing colours for the napkins and the cutlery bows with all the trepidation of an inauguration ball.

There will be no diplomatic considerations to whom the aliens should meet if they are wont to request a meeting with our leader. They will assume, being of higher minds than even our most esteemed savants, that we would be a world ruled by one ruler, united by our common humanity.

They will be wrong.

Some people will suggest the aliens meet Obama, and others still Julia Gillard and even some will suggest they meet Sarah Palin, assuming she has been suitably disavowed of her hunting rifle.

The United Nations will resolve none of this but they do have a little group that convenes to discuss matters relevant to space, mostly matters the equivalent to stellar housekeeping insofar as reminding countries not to leave their space junk floating about. “Don’t leave that there, someone could trip over it!” you might imagine them yelling, before throwing a soup ladle at someone’s head.

First, some perspective.

In 1990, the spacecraft Voyager 1 was sailing away from Earth on a mission it had, at that point, already been obediently playing out since 1977. It was 4 billion miles from Earth and it turned back, a parting glance, the white-gloved wave from a steaming train in and old time movie as it pulls away from the train station, and it took a photo.

This is that photo. That dot is Earth.

I don’t believe anybody can say it better, so here is astronomer Carl Sagan’s speech in reference to this photo which shows, buried in its depths, our home:

“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it,
you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever
heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate
of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and
economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every
creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young
couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and
explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar,
every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species,
lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small
stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those
generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the
momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited
by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable
inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their
misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their
hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have
some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale
light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our
obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from
elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that
astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my
mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits
than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our
responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to
preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

He’s right, of course. That’s us, a little dot revolving around an impressive star in a solar system, one of millions in a galaxy some 100,000 light years across which is itself one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe which are spread out across an expanse of 96 billion light years that continues to grow. Each galaxy contains billions of stars like our very own Sun, not to mention the planets that are drawn to these stars like giggly school-girls at an old time dance.

And between each galaxy there is near enough to nothing. The cold, empty vacuum of endless space that stretches inconceivable distances, as if constructed entirely to break our minds if we hesitate to think about it for too long.

That Voyager One spacecraft which took that happy snap of our home is now 17 billion miles away from our sun. Bear in mind that a light year is the speed it takes light to travel 6 trillion miles, so not that far in the scheme of things. But it’s the farthest man-made object we have ever sent, to do a job we didn’t even know it could do.

It is in a patch of space at the end of our solar system where the solar winds have stopped but where it is still travelling at 60,000 kilometres per hour. In a few more years it will burst through the edge of our solar system and into interstellar space, the vastness between the stars.

What will it find? It’s still sending signals back to Earth from 17 billion miles away even though it was built 33 years ago. To put this in perspective, the radio on my car stopped working in 2006 and it had only been around for 15 years. To be honest, I don’t think my car ever appreciated being called Shirley but that is still no excuse for shoddy workmanship.

I think it daft to believe that one day, from somewhere, we won’t find life. Maybe it won’t be at all advanced. Maybe it will be a few cells who laid up on a rock in some distant outcrop and didn’t want to leave. Maybe it will be an entire civilisation. Maybe it will be the army men I left in a sock when I was a child who’ve somehow gained access to a super-sonic rocket. Who knows?

But with trillions upon trillions of stars and planets suspended in the forever that is out there, I think it absurd that we won’t find something. And I truly wonder what they would think if they ever came to visit, us, here, on this rock upon which we have been thrust.

Is it a product of an advanced civilisation that through progress the folly of what makes us ‘human’ is left behind. That maybe intolerance is left to blister in the sun while progress dictates to its people a better set of circumstances. A better understanding. Will they visit and call us savages?

Or will they be, more or less, like us. Because if that is the case, I will ache with disappointment. We’ve told ourselves since the dawn of time that the march of development will make us all better. Yes, progress is slow. But we’ve come a long way from skull-smashing in mouldy caves, through the trials of the medieval ages and the various witch-hunts on various members of humanity from century to century.

I would like to believe there will come a time where this congealment of humanity might learn the strengths of the individuals who comprise it. And it would be easier to believe, yes, if there were others out there in the depths of the universe itself who had been through it. Not only to show that it works, but to jolt this sleepy backwater out of its miasma of hatred, intolerance and selfish ways and make sure we do it ourselves.

Space is a big place. Out there, there has to be something or someone or some people who have figured it out better than us. Something that would lend us a sense of perspective and then never ask for it back.

The act of writing

Hey guess what, I've posted the below before as well. On my old blog. I'm basically editing my former self and rescuing all the posts I like and leaving the ones where I yell swear words at Jesus in the corridors of history where they belong. That's no longer me. The evolution of self is so evident if you have 500 posts to re-read that you wrote on the tail-end of a nervous breakdown associated with The Gay. This time, however, I have slightly extended what I wrote previously. Think of it like extra scenes on the faux-DVD of medicore blockbuster tickle of a former life. You're welcome.

*

Ever since I was little I've felt like I was this human exo-skeleton wrapped around the greater limits of my vocabulary. That somehow, beneath my pasty, fleshy exterior there were words like reticulated and flummoxed coursing through my veins. And that is all well and good but the beauty, and subsequent horror, of language is that it has to be expressed. And getting a written sentence out of somebody made of words is a lot like carving away the skin with a hunting knife and performing a hatchet-job surgical procedure to extract syntax and descriptors and that one word that always goes missing even though you could have sworn you knew where it was.

That's what writing feels like. Writing anything. I write much better when I'm angry. Because when I'm angry, I'm injured. It's like a bullet hole in the chest and the words just come pouring out, soaking the keyboard and magically appearing on here. Perhaps transported by some sort of word elf, the over-looked species of elf, if you ask me.

And my problem, perhaps it is also yours, is that I can never write enough. I write 45-hours a week during my day job and then I come home and I blog. Because if I don't do it, it feels like there is this growth inside me, this mass of congealed letters and meaning and language.

Most recently, and by recent I mean for the past 5-years, I have this book. Two books now. And I can't even call them books because right now they are ideas in stacks of notepads. But the books, the books are already inside me and I just have to somehow transplant them into reality. On to hundreds of pages. That's what I would like to do.

But the books, to my eternal fear, will probably get blocked somewhere inside me. They are a whole other beast. It's a crippling frustration for me, in particular, that I can give birth to an idea only for it to appear still born on the page. They never seem good enough. I'm willing to bet you give me three life times and everything I write that's meant to be a book will look a lot more like paperweights.

But they're there, nonetheless, taking up space beside all the other words and sentences. And someway and somehow, I have to get them out.

That's why I blog. You can't just wrench an entire book out through your chest cavity for the same reason you can't give birth to an elephant if you have a pelvis the size of a toaster. So my words tend to come out in little trickles, embracing the ill-discipline of short burst writing. Anything that requires the structure and the trauma of a one year operation just stays behind, festering in my head as I lie awake at night thinking of all the things I want to write about if only I could find away to commit them to the tangible.

Everything I write, when it gets regurgitated on to a page or a website takes a little piece of me with it. These words right here are a little stamp of my self. They came from me and they will, for better or worse, bear the tidings of my DNA and the little pieces of gore attached to my otherwise serviceable character. It's a lot like chucking sausages at a window and turning it around for the world to see.

The trick, of course, is to be completely honest with yourself. You can try to hide your imperfections if you want but the words you use to do it won't come from you. You'll borrow them from all sorts of places. From cereal packets and late night television commercials; from magazines and newspapers. And you'll assemble them like a ransom note of the soul. They'll be hollow and you'll know it. You could knock on each sentence and hear the echo like a protestation shouted out in the cave of your own deceit.

So if you take the scalpel to the little blighters hiding deep within you, and you slice them out with the precision of a madman dosed up on morphine you will end up with a little train of thought that's a little bit ugly and a little bit tainted but a whole lot of you.

And, if you're anything like me, you'll sit back in exhaustion and marvel that anything that can be torn from the tangle of capillaries just under your skin could come out looking even remotely OK. But it's you. And you need to do it.

Words, like most things, can be beautiful in real life but toxic if they are inside you.

The driveshaft's connected to the...something something

Why hello there. I didn't realise traffic would be this bad.

I really don't know anything about cars. Seriously, if I had been run down during a late night drive-over and had to pick the offender from a police line-up of 4WDs, Toyotas and BMWs I would probably grab a potato. I would grab a potato and ask the policeman whether it was at all possible that I had fractured my eye because I had been driven over by a potato.

I once suffered a flat tyre. Not only could I not change the fucking thing (I looked temporarily for a way to make the tools all fit together before climbing into the boot and crying for an hour) but I didn't want the road side assist people to know that I could not change the thing. So I hid the tools in a tree. I hid them in a tree because I was ashamed.

Sometimes, particularly if I am lost and disoriented, I find myself surrounded by people who know a lot about cars. This also happens if I swerve to avoid a cat on the road and end up at my mechanic. I never go there intentionally.

The Car People (I imagine them literally as a race of people with their own dialect) talk at me and explain to me all the reasons why my car is sad. I think I am using the technical term. And then I have to ask them which one my car is and then they shake their head and then I have a little chuckle because they spelled 'talk' funny.

They present me with a bill that is laughable and attempt an explanation of what its itemisations refer to. They say something about changing the oil and then I make a grand speech about the importance of individuality and how no-one should ever change just because other people mightn't like you.

Anyway, point, I do not know anything about cars.

This makes my purchase of the most detailed driving / racing game ever all the more inexplicable. This is a game with over 1000 cars available for driving and some myriad combinations of fine-tuning available to make them go really fast around a bunch of tracks.

This is about as logical a purchase for me as, I don't know, a spanner.

But I'm addicted. I'm addicted to the thing I know nothing about.

The game asks me if I would like to upgrade my car's drivetrain for $2500 and I'm all: "I have no idea what the fuck a drivetrain is. But it sounds important. I'll take two." Except I cannot have two, I've now been informed.

What kind of tyres would I like to fit to my car in order that it might want to go on the zippy track thing? I don't know, round ones?

Turns out there are sport tyres - hard, medium and soft - and slicks (I used a lingo thing!) and tyres for the dirt. Talk about re-inventing the fucking wheel.

Watching me play this game is like watching a cat play a pinball machine. Swatting randomly at levers that do things and light up other things. I have this little fear that I'll push it too far and upgrade my car into an office chair with a V8 engine. Or a cupboard.

Would I like to attach an elbow to my chassis? Why the fuck not. At the very least the novelty value will increase my edge in competition.

Holy throttlesticks Batman, I love playing games in my cocoon of ignorance.

It's working out, I tell you.