From the Bunker of the Dammed.

There's a pyromaniac on the loose at Northcott ghetto, for several weeks he/she has put a match to the mountainous garbage pile at the dumpsters 21 yards from my front door, usually on Saturday nights, a true Saturnalia with devils dancing in and out of the flames. The fire brigade should park here permanently, they're here every second night with false alarms and ice-zombie melt-downs, the shrieks, wails and detonations makes me think it's the end of the world, I hear it as I hide out in my bunker and sweat on the panic maybe crashing through my door.

My neighbour Eric the schitzo viking has been taken away by the police, after 21 years of howling till dawn, shitting in his pants and masturbating in front of little old ladies, someone's finally figured out he's socially inept and needs assisted care, they've put him in the caged yards of Caritas Psyche bin and he's not coming back, thank nogod. On the other side of my bunker I hear Cursula and Bawl express sorrow at his incarceration, they'll have no one to bludge cigarettes off, he was a perfect match for their retardation, he made them look good when they got together to natter bullshit saccharine humanisms, like they really care.

They still live their brain-dead lives on my doorstep, they can't sit comfortably in their flat because it's filled to the ceiling with the trash she's rescued from the burning dumpsters, and so I hear endlessly all the drivel they've got to bawl to each other. Cursula shouts to any zombie whose ears aren't plugged about her miraculous job interview, the first she's ever had, she's past 40 and a drug-daze has been her main occupation. Yet there was that one time she tried out at the Black Hole brothel on Elizabeth Street, when she'd heaved her vast breasts, that normally hung about her knees, up into a dirty corset and sat all night staring cow-like into the mugs of countless desperate punters and not even got a whiff of a job, looked upon with disgust so that she trudged home at dawn penniless and moaned loudly that it must be because they were intellectually her inferiors. "No!" I shouted from my bunker, "it's because you're a fat ugly slag!"

Yes, you guessed it, I've gone mad, from a life of being beat up, shat on, put upon and bullshitted to, surrounded, swamped and trampled by an army of misfit lumpens from the guttersnipe demi-monde. I've even been thrown out of the Lifeboat for Losers Cafe, the Pick Your Low Piccolo, for starting too many arguments, and there's no lower level of Hell to flee to, that Venus Fly-trap hothouse was the lowest. I've been very ill of late, my leg infection and anti-biotics making me so weak I can hardly walk and still I dragged my sorry arse up to the Dick-o-low Cafe naively thinking it the last refuge for the dispossessed and dysfunctional. Though I knew it wasn't the kind of place that would lend a helping hand, I was shocked at the relish taken at putting the boot in while I was down.

First Bobby Dogcart abused one of my girl-friends, calling her a smart-mouthed bitch and a drug-addict who was always bludging off everyone, a perfect description of himself and the opposite of her hardworking, generous soul. He kept on and on till I screamed I'd throw my coffee in his face if he said one more bad word to her. All of Roslyn Street tuned into the drama as we were sitting at the tables outside, a hundred eyeballs popped at me and once again I was the loudmouthed villain in the endless melodrama that was the Dick-o-low Cafe.

The next day was Good Friday, always a bad day for me, and Vitto had a fit trying to rip his gift Easter eggs from Knobby Israel's clutches declaring they weren't for old regulars, they were for the newbies who he was still honeymooning with. I pissed myself laughing till the retarded assistant cook rushed out from behind the counter and for no good reason picked on me, calling me a free-loader, a bludger and why don't I get a real job like him frying eggs and baking tasteless cakes nobody wanted. He demanded I fuck-off, while Vitto stood there like an Italian hobgoblin and let his employee abuse me, a regular of 30 years patronage, who'd gone through every high and low with him, when he'd been bashed, robbed, sacked, raided, insulted and abandoned I'd stuck by his side and fought off the demons with him. As far as free-loading goes, I've done a lot of artwork to promote his dump and never even got a free cup of coffee for it, that's how tight he is.

I think senility is taking over the old fairy, he's slaving away till the point of collapse and in fatigue taking out his bad moods on us loyal regulars, I suppose because he feels safe in so doing, and I can wear his insults gallantly, but not get evicted by his half-wit assistant. The ditzy old queen is gonna drop dead behind the stupid coffee machine and we just have to put up with his grumpy mood swings, that's the way he is, an old turtle stuck in his shell. He insists the cafe needs him 24/7 when I've got the sneaky suspicion he's a millionaire, with property all over that he could sell off and live like a king for the rest of his decrepit days, but instead he cries poor and eats the left-over scraps his customers leave on their plates, like he's stuck in World War 2 and the Nazis are over-running the Italian neighbourhood. I'm absolutely livid, the cold abuse has built up over 30 years till the feral cook's insults are the last straw that broke my much humped back and I'm never going back to that black-widow spider's lair. I feel like the djinn released from the grimy, old bottle, I'm free, free at last!

(I was reading Richard Dawkin's "The God Delusion" and got riled up by a few of the cafe's regulars who were shocked I would read such offensive propaganda, for atheists are the devil's footsoldiers! Charles Gropin, like a pontificating pseudo-intellectual windbag, tried to convince me religion has only brought beauty into the world and certainly never caused any harm, those twin towers in New York would've fallen even without the Moslems and Christians hating each other! He's just trying to get up Peter Pumpkin's bum, who comes across as a brainwashed religio-maniac, together they're composing an aria of Mary Magdelene's love songs to Jesus, it seems Charles would sell out all history and ignore "gay" oppression just to please his obsessive lust object, Peter. That medieavil leftover superstition, God, still rules the lower levels of Hell, especially at the Pope-mobile Cafe, and I just don't think I can take such moronic nonsense any more. I've been driven MAD!)

I'm now reading "What Happened to Gay Life?" by Robert Reynolds and it makes me realise I'm not the only disaffected old queer bemoaning the lost funkiness of Sydney, distressed by the fading of a Utopia I'd struggled so hard to head towards. I think I'll even quit Sydney, for me it's become like a purgatory of no-hoping disillusionment, sucking me down into depression, a glitzier version of the old convict colony of masters, slaves and overseers, everyone stripping flesh from their fellows backs to get on top of the shitheap, afraid the next fellow might get there ahead of them. Everyone feels to be in a panic, shoving each other out of the way, desperate to hang onto what they'd worked so hard for but it all slipping down some gurgle hole of religious terrorism and economic and environmental collapse. Anyway, Social Darwinism suggests old flakes like me should be discarded in the race for survival, I'm just taking up space.

Maybe Darwin town will provide a new start for me, or at least a change of air, and if I want to find out what "a hole" really is, there's no better place, it's like a frontier town out West and I'm a cowboy refugee from the Brokeback Cafe of Kings Cross. I need a change of life, or it's suicide if I remain stuck in my bunker, I've had Sydney and Sydney has had me!!! But do I have the courage to flee the false-security of my bunker and start all over again? Who fucking cares? Goodbye cruel world! If my body is found comatose in my bunker like a catatonic shitzophrenic then you know I've gone off to live in the future.

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Surviving the Wastelands.

I snapped awake, lost as to where I was for some moments, a beeping noise from some strange machinery having disturbed my catatonic sleep. Oh yeah, my futuristic avatar and the travail of staying alive. After much cogitation I think I've figured out what my secret stash of mysterious garbage is trying to communicate. The glittering band of metal I can fit around my wrist with the numbers clicking over is some kind of dating device and it says we're now in the year 2107. The ragged clumps of paper the Chief calls "dirty fucking books" and has forbidden any of us to keep have finally yeilded up to my curious perusal the amazing tale of what has happened to our world in the last 100 years. I'm stunned to realise how we came to be here, scrabbling hard for a living amongst the dusty mounds of trash that stretch to the horizon and beyond and which the Soothsayers name in whispers as The Wastelands.

I've spent countless hours of study, hidden in my underground bunker away from the glaring sun, the choking winds and supicious eyes of my fellow tribals, flipping the strange objects back and forth, and finally the arcane letters, numbers and pictures have fallen into place to inform me of who I am and where I've come from. I have long been adept at deciphering the signs and messages littered about the poisonous wastes and, while the Chief has found this talent suspect, the tribe has benifited greatly for I have led the way to buried, hidden caches of foodstuffs and helpful objects in our daily struggle to survive this dangerous, tumultuous landscape. I was given 'Leaping Wolf' status as scout and scrounger and thus had the freedom to secrete the wondrous things that took my fancy and, sneaking off when others were busy with their rituals of rooting and rutting, I long contemplated the meanings I was sure were bound within those weird fabrications.

It's been such a long struggle to stay alive, thru cunning and strength I've made it to my fourteenth year, the hallowed hair has grown in my groin and I have gut-wrenching feelings of longing and displacement I can't explain except that it must have something to do with my rite of passage into adulthood that is to happen on the next full moon and for which all the elders seem to be overly excited about. Every year on my birth moon I've been inspected all over, prodded and squeezed, and the Soothsayers have exclaimed their satisfaction at my growth and progress, applauding my musculature and plumpness, spoiling me with treats of foodscraps where others have been made to go hungry, making me feel special and excited about my big day forthcoming for which they have prepared me all my life.

It's a tough ritual they warn, from which I may not come forth the complete being, able to continue and increase the strength of my tribe, but I feel that now I have figured out the history of our existence this knowledge can only improve my chances, I can see the future more clearly and thus prepare my journey where others have been dazed, ignorant and handicapped. For it seems calamitous events have beset my race of humankind, the much revered and oft told legend of the "lost civilisation" was the very thing that had brought about all the world's downfall and reduced us people to the life of apes, living off rotting detritus, carrion and superstition.

Human industry had enduced wild climate change that wrecked the cities with hurricanes, floods, tornados and droughts, then earthquakes and decay brought the mainifold concrete and glass towers crashing down; there were wars fought over religion, water, food, resources and territory, even intelligent machines battling mere flesh and blood till unimaginable weapons of mass destruction were detonated and whole societies were destroyed; plagues of vicious beasts and deadly viruses were set loose to ravage the left-over populations; and to finish us off poisonous materials had polluted the environments and distorted the human genome, artificial compounds and leftover wastes of a greedy science ran amok so that only a mutated race of beings once known as humans now lurked and hunted amidst the mountains of rubbish folklore has reverently called "the once was consumer's paradise."

I have been singled out for special treatment all my life, fussed over and fattened up, as I am radically different from my fellows because I have five digits on four limbs, two eyes and well-formed genitalia and fit the desired ideal according to the Soothsayers blue-print of archaic human physical perfection they keep as backdrop to their altar in the tumble-down church of their crazed religion. My father is the Chief, of course, for only he, the Strong One, near physical perfection himself, has been allowed to mate with the women of our tribe. And he has bred many malformed children, most of whom have not survived to dance under their Moon of Sperm-Giving, many mysteriously disappearing before they even made it to their big day. They were the weak, the soft, the caring, who preferred to play and fuck instead of fight and kill, such were some of my beloved brothers and playmates, swallowed by the Void, and not one of the Sweet Smilers ever returned from the Hades of Manhood. I pretended nastiness to stay alive, coldy observing the ways and wherefores of sub-human behaviour, outsmarting their constant surveillance.

For those who survived to keep the Tribe intact were the strong, the brutal, the viciously ruthless, misshapen and freakish but seemingly able to defeat the ogres of the Ordeal to become adult warriors for the Cause and thus protect The Family from it's enemies, other tribes and beasties that live to hunt us. The Chief himself has eleven toes and fingers which he tries to hide with ragged gloves and mouldy boots never taken off, but the Soothsayers hiss to each other their disatisfactions about his divine unfitness, and since my birth he has caste a jaundiced eye upon me, jealous of the Soothsayers awed predictions that one day I will lead the tribe and consort with the women to produce the perfect human once again able to rule the world and bring us back to civilised bliss and freedom from want.

My sisters are mostly kept alive to slave, rut and give birth to monsters, who die or thrive according to their fitness, while my ugly brothers are trained to hunt, scavenge and fight off the Others who would live off us. Few survive to adulthood and the Great Feast of Death and Resurrection held every mid-winter moon is joyless and cantankerous, The Family is small in number and composed of the cruel and cadaverous, always bickering over precedence, in food, honour and sex. But for all their misshapen disgruntlements I miss many of my childhood companions sorely, there were some who made this harsh life more bearable with their smiles, hugs and fondlings. Down into the dungeon church they go to attend the secret rite of passage in their honour and they don't return, not strong enough to withstand the Ordeal, gone on to a better world I'm told.

The Chief, the Elders and Soothsayers all, in united croaking voice, refuse to answer my questions as to what goes on in the dark dungeons below, and are much aggrieved as to my critique of their foul beliefs. For the central icon in their Religion of the One True God is a dead corpse tied to a stick, a bleached-white skeleton with arms outstretched as if in benediction of the Wastes. He is the Ruler of the Universe, the One God Death, from which all come and to which all go, no matter what or whom.

And I have wailed into their crabby faces, but what of beauty, fun and adventure in a world so awesome it contains stars and moonlit nights, and bright-hued flowers that grow from desert trash, and melifluous songs that can't help but flow from hearts relaxing in a rare cool breeze and lush morning sunlight, with sweet water that parches a thirst and smiles from fellows when a new-found treat is shared, that life in fact is wondrous and moments of happiness can be snatched from all the filth and gloom. And this has also set me apart and caused the tribe to cast suspicious glances upon me, as maybe I am not quite right in the head nor the perfect speciman of manhood that they hoped for. My birth moon waxes lurid in the sky and my life's great test approaches, I gird my loins and sharpen my wits, for I am determined to rise from the dungeon's depths and win a marvellous life in this wild world of the Wastelands, for all that the odds are aginst me.

Yet right up to the week before my special moon waxed full the Elders told me of their love and honoured me with extra food, caressed me with affection and felt my plump limbs, all the while cackling and drooling in appreciation of my prowess. To be worthy of the honour of adulthood I must place upon the Altar of Death the carcasses of our most vicious enemy, the giant man-eating Rats that hunt us in the night, the tribe will feast upon this meat in celebration of my Grand Arrival and I am sent off into the Wastes with much bally-hooed expectation. Armed with bow and arrow and a spear of jagged metal, I set off with my trusty hunting dog, Butch, leading the way. I'd rescued him as a pup, for tho declared an abomination with his two malformed heads and jaws full of razor teeth, he was perfect for taking on the grotesque, intelligent Rats and, being the stronger, I had trained him to take on several at a time and tear them to bits in merciless, unyeilding battle.

Using both his snarling heads to sniff out the trails and rank recesses where the gruesome beasts thrived it was not long before we came upon one of their noxious nests hidden amidst a yard of car wrecks. For all their abilities to plan attack and defence strategies, we surprised a family of Rats huddled over a screaming victim, ripping apart and devouring the hapless human they had caught in one of their clever traps. We quickly dispatched seven of them, my arrows killing three straight off, Butch ripping apart another two in a fury of flying fur and snapping teeth.

Their leader confronted me with a brave malevolence shining from his beady, Rat eyes, his alpha male status denoted by the ragged white lab coat and the weird head-dress of twittering machinery he wore, colourful wires flaring out and plugged straight into his brain. Respecting his alpha rank, I took him on in one on one combat, ducking the swipes of the scalpel he thrust at me and stabbing him thru the heart with my spear. I strung the corpses on either end of a pole which I heaved over one shoulder and, with Butch lapping up the blood dripping in my wake, I set off back to Home and the loving embrace of my family.

It was expected that I'd be gone for several days to garner the prize of seven meaty Rats, and only return when my appointed day was dawning, but having achieved my goal so quickly I was eager to arrive early for the feast of one of my step-brothers, who was also ripe for passage into manhood and for whom I felt a dear affection towards. He was a darling, always sharing with me what he had and keeping me warm at night, snuggled tight against me, and I hoped so badly that he would be strong enough to win thru. The Family considered him particularly abhorrent and treated him badly as he was covered in fine hair and had a tail extruding from his butt like a monkey, but for me he was a delightful companion, I found him cute and funny and I always helped him when he was trodden down.

He was given the first day of the full moon for his ritual while I was honoured with the second and it was strictly ordained that they were to be seperate, secret ceremonies, only to be witnessed by the Elders and Soothsayers. But I was curious as to the details of the Ordeal and thought that if I got a sneak preview of the process it might forewarn me of what I might have to overcome. And perhaps I could help him also to stay alive.

And so laying aside the carcasses of my bloody booty I crept towards the dungeon of the Church from which issued ponderous, dolorous drumbeats and hair-raising chants. I had recently discovered a secret entrance to the sacred tombs and plucking up my courage in the face of the One God Death I clambered down the crumbling shaft to hide behind a pile of rotten bones and witness the doings of the entranced creatures cavorting below in front of the altar. I arrived at the very moment when my brother, seemingly stupified and delerious, was laid out upon a slab of stone under the outstretched arms of the grinning skeletal godhead. As the Soothsayers leapt into a frenzy of wails and screeching mumbo-jumbo the Chief, my father, stepped forward and stabbed my beloved brother with a large splinter of black glass, slicing open his chest and tearing out his heart which he quickly sunk his teeth into and gobbled up greedily.

The Soothsayers and Elders all rushed forth and tore at the corpse with taloned hands, ripping lumps of flesh from the shuddering body and stuffing the bleeding mess into their gaping maws. In a few endless minutes my brother was torn to pieces and devoured by those of the tribe I'd long been taught to respect and follow, their faces covered in blood, the gore hanging from their mouths and dripping down their bedraggled chests.

I could restrain my disgust and protest no longer, I shouted out for them to desist from their hideous feast, calling them beasts no better than the smart Rats they denigrated and hunted with murderous glee. The riotious mob froze mid-action, gasping in horror at my desecration of their holy sanctuary and all looked up aghast to where I stood waving my spear in threat. Then with a collective roar they screeched for me to come down and take my rightful place also on the altar of sacrifice. The Chief, my father, ran towards me and yelled that this is what I had long been prepared for, not to usurp his God-given leadership but to be sacrificed for the good of the tribe, that was what my physical perfection and difference had declared would be my fate. For the Lord God Death had decreed in the one good holy book, the Sacred Text of Abraham, that the sons were to be food for the father and it was the Elders who caused the Family to live on, not the young and foolish, and I must do as tradition demanded and come down and give myself over to Death and be devoured, for then the Family would be assured of long life. The old villain crawled on all fours towards me, clambering over the heaps of garbage and ancient bones, his eleven clawed fingers reaching out for me. In blind-fury I gave my reply, I put arrow to bow and shot him thru his warped braincase so that he stumbled backwards and fell rolling to the feet of the stunned congregation all bloodied below.

They shrieked and wailed sing-song laments but as I turned to flee they called out my name, and shouted hallelulyahs, the leader was born to be the Father of the Tribe and life could continue as of old. I was to come down and take my place as Chief in front of the Great God Death, I had performed His will as I was meant to and, like Winter had shorn the world of the decrepit and barren, now could Spring arise and bring on new life to regenerate the Family. I spat in their faces that I was mighty tired of their gruesome ways and besides, it was not possible that I would be their grand Procreator as there was one more way that I was different from them and it was that I loved fellows of my own sex and only wanted such love and company, to breed monsters with monsters was abhorrent to me and I dammed their continuance to the cruel fate they dammed others, to devour each other in the Hell of their own making.

They cried and roared with hatred and disgust, I was the devil incarnate warned of and condemned in the One Holy Book and again they yelled for me to descend to the sacred altar so that they might tear me to bits and rub me into the dust. I pushed at a huge pile of junk and bones that teetered in front of me and it came tumbling down upon them, crushing and obstructing them, bony arms upflung and wrinkled skin flayed open, as I repeated my defiance, swearing I would rather face the perils of the Wastelands alone than belong to them or give them the pleasure of my flesh. I then sprinted back along my hidden passage and up into the scorching sunlight. Butch, my faithful dog, waited there with tongue lolling, and I sicked him onto one determined old crone who'd made it up the tunnel after me, Butch ripping off her crabby face as she raised a shin-bone to curse me.

He then followed me as I ran to my private lair secreted under a mound of steel-girders and office-furniture debris, and there I quickly stuffed into a pack the artifacts I thought might come in handy on my arduous sojourn, some canned and dried foodstuffs, a canteen of water, a ground sheet and jacket for the freezing nights, and then we rushed off, me and my faithful dog, while other tribes-people crawled from their hovels to watch me leave, their eyes popping in surprise at my earnest, scowling haste. I trotted off down the dusty trail that led out of our garbage-heap enclosure, Butch at my heels, and I caste not one glance back at my supposed Home, determined to forget my so-called Family, that people of mutant inbreeds who had renounced their claim of Humanity to satisfy a lust for meat and power.

I shaded my eyes from the dust and glare and searched out a path that led thru the mountains of refuse and filth, mounds that stretched all the way to the horizon, and I wondered what lay beyond, and felt an illicit thrill, that whatever it may be, it could be no worse than the horrors I had grown up with. The Unknown held a certain frisson of promise, a life of adventure and knowledge hard won, and I ran the faster so as to be over that horizon before the dark night crashed down upon me, and on into my life, whatever that would be.

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The Party for Mardi Gras Grouches.

Febuary/March has rolled upon us again, a time of year I feel lonesome and alienated for it's the weekend of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade and I'm reminded what a nobody, ugly old failure I've grown into when confronted by the tidal wave of manicured and waxed youth in their expensive designer gear, all gung-ho for a system that had perennially disowned them. I was one of the original '78ers who started the whole shebang by marching down the golden mile of Oxford street and getting the shit kicked out of me by the reactionary cops at Taylor Square but now I feel there's no space for me, even at the head of the parade with the other ancient '78ers, for there's a ruling 'gay' headspace that I don't fully identify with and, being terribly twisted from a lifetime of predjudice, I can't find much to celebrate.

(I'm impressed by Gore Vidal's line, "there's no such thing as a homosexual, only homosexual acts". I resent being reduced to a "thing" based on my sexual preferences, I'm much more than that, I'm an artist, adventurer, atheist, travellor, a contemplator of science, history, politics and philosophy, a nurse, a pagan and a free-thinker to name a few! Yet I understand the oppression same-sex acts have endured thru-out history and I've always fought against it. I guess I'm resigned to the inescapable fact of being labelled "gay".)

Not that I would want the parade cancelled, it's fun for those who like an outrageous party and it does keep 'queerness' shining gaily in the public eye, but for the jaundiced, the jaded and the just plain fucked over it's somewhat of a trial to make it thru the whole month of activities as we're reminded of how it's all passed us irrevocably by, and we envy those fuckers who are making lots of money out of it. If I'd known what a money-spinner, cudos grabber and grandstand for careerist-queens it would become I honestly would never have marched all those decades ago. For the first few years it was an open cultural festival wherein any gay artist could get a showing, now you have to be a famous whore to get a look in. Even watching from the crowd is a terror, like when I spent hours trying to save my space by the curb only to have a scraggy bitch push me out of the way and when I complained she set her brutish boyfriend upon me who hissed, "fuck off fag!" into my hairy ears.

So it was with great relief that I was invited to a dinner-party by fellow disgruntled fags and I didn't have to wander the edge of the crowd lost and lonely, peering into strange heterosexual faces and getting my crotch sniffed by nazi police dogs. Charles Gropin decided to have an appocolyptic soiree of queer deadbeats at his Bohemian pad in Kings Cross, for it felt like the end of the world and his apartment looked suitably like a fall-out shelter after the Bomb had dropped. The other dispossessed guests were Peter Pumpkin, the talented young composer and violinist, Ayesha the bedraggled two-headed drag(on) lady, Nadine Sardine, a trannie as thin as a fish straight out of the can and just as depressed, and Allison, the one real woman, terminally ill, who seemed sadly bemused thru.out the night by the hysterical antics of us 'boys'. The set-up was the making of a riotious 'gay' farce, to be staged at a future Mardis Gras festival, only I wouldn't be able to kiss enough 'gay' arse to get it put on.

I love playing the bitter/twisted po-faced queen, it's a good cover for my inner Mother Theresa saintly self, (thus I dont have the onerous duty of the laying on of healing hands), so get ready for some vinegar-tits vignettes. And yes, I realise I'm only reinforcing the stereotypes and antipathies thrown like mud at my 'kind' by writing this tripe, I divest "poof" and "fag" of it's power to hurt if I sling it first, and I'd much rather be a "fairy" than a brute. I like to see it as therapy, getting hairs out of my arse and bravely laughing in the jaws of the BEAST as it cruelly devours me.

(Oh, yeah, I believe in political agitation, same as the Gay and Lesbian Marchers do, and I want equal rights with Hets such as marriage, tho it doesn't seem to give Them much happiness. Compared to other societies, Christian and Muslim fundamentalist for instance, we're in a paradise of freedoms so we should relish it and struggle for gays all around the world. I believe in a World Homosexual Revolution, so my fellow poofs and lezzos = fight on!)

My friend Charles always reminds me of a dissolute, 21st century Oscar Wilde, he writes effete plays and acts in anything he can fit his bum into, including TV ads for erectile dysfunction and enlarged prostate problems. He looks like a dugong with legs and is just as sweet and harmless. He'd slaved all day stewing a veal curry and the kitchen looked like a football stadium toilet after a big match, I had to close my eyes and hope for the best to swallow the brown lumps of meat, such is my esteem for him as I'm usually vegetarian and quite squeamish about sanitary cooking conditions. I arrived hours early, as I always do for every occassion, for I love to witness the preperations, know what I'm in for and catch the hosts with their pants down.

Charles was determined to dress in drag and I had to comment on one frumpy rag after another, all atrocious, no style, as if stolen from the wardrobe of a demented granny pensioner. He finally settled on a sheer white slip that revealed his pudgy tits, black tights stretched over his dumpy arse, a macrame shawl and a tie around his head so that he looked like Thoroughly Stodgy Milly, a tramp vamp from the Roaring 'Naughties. Then Peter Pumpkin showed up and he too decided bad drag was required for our Mardis Gras leftovers salon, quickly stretching over his great lumpen frame what he thought was a Dutch national costume, skirt, blouse and milk-maid cap. Then Ayesha the Drag(on) appeared in her black ratty Madonna cowgirl outfit and I realised the night was shaping up to be a psychedelic Mad Hatter's Tea Party. Sardine arrived breathless and late in a Labour Party apparatchick power-pants-suit and as I was the only one there in actual male drag I felt quite butch, the only real man in the room, and I got quite fussed over because of it.

Allison brought the ganjha for us Rasta freaks and we got very drunk and stoned as the non-celebration ground on, laughing uproariously at inane witticisms and vicious bonmots, the usual gay claptrap. There was a 7th guest who didn't show, but his ghost was ever present, a gorgeous young fellow named Chris who has lately favoured the Piccolo Freak's Club with his presence, finding us derelict fags fascinating, until he grows out of it and moves on to more saner pastures, as many engenues have done before him. He rides a motorbike, looks and dresses like something out of Tom of Finland but without the shlong stretching halfway down his thigh, leaving that up to our fervid imaginations, it's all in the packaging these days, and this boy is packaged like a blonde Adonis. He was all we talked about for the first hour or so, and thank nogod he didn't turn up for it would've been mighty uncomfortable to have a pack of desperate queens posturing and drooling over him with very litle partying accomplished. I imagined a surreal daisy-chain effect, for Charles is unnervingly obsessed with Peter who in turn is gaga over spunky Chris who I fantasise is secretly turned on by me, and like beauty attracted to the beast, chases me about the La Boheme dump while the 2 poofs and 3 "girls" glumly look on.

In reality Peter had no guy to focus on so he kept trying to feel me up all night, kissing and hugging me, because he trusted me and knew I wouldn't respond, (I love another, in a galaxy far, far away), all to get on Charle's goat, who never let up with the moonie eyes and declarations of undying love beamed in Pete's direction, quite boring. Like classic camp queens they played opera records all night, Maria Callas warbling loudly to shatter glass and nerves, till a neighbour had to bang bang bang on the door, furiously disturbed, to which Sardine yelled like a wharfie, "fuck off!" as she slammed the door in the irate, straight guy's face, confirming his opinion that "fags are the worst!" Charles left his vinyl records scattered across the floor and we all had to walk on them as we moved about, and when he put on Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" the record was so badly scratched it kept jumping tracks, shreiking, shredding, ripping and roaring till the paint peeled from the walls and Ayesha's tiny lapdog went nuts, spinning in circles, yapping and tearing at Charle's stockinged heels, the party descending into a hellish, crashing crescendo, the outre street parade outside reaching a climax thankfully unnoticed by us stoned freaks who laughed so hard we pissed our pants.

Charles had also left his weight-lifting dumbells out for us all to trip over, a signifier to Peter that he was really a macho muscle man under all that poofy blubber and we couldnt help calling him Charles Shwartzneggar all night and satirising his vain attempt at manhood. In the midst of all the fun Sardine ponderously announced that she was eternally depressed and considering suicide to which we giggled and said, "good, hurry up, you're such a dog, we'll help put you out of your misery!" Not very compasionate but in actuality we were all in the same sinking boat, leftover fops who few cognoscenti, ourselves included, found attractive or worthy of grand attention, and thus we filled the void with barbed jokes, pretend 'gayness' and histrionic poses, while the world burned and humanity fucked itself into orgiastic forgetfulness. We were 'human' after all.

I can't blame us for our hysteria at being rejected by a culture that worships youth, beauty and success, and abhors 'fairies', men who are less than zero if they're not brutish, breeding warriors with muscles for brains. We were all struggling to realise our potential as artists and probably none of us would, the competition was cut-throat and anti-pathetical. And, like Marilyn, we can't be loved enough, but none of us had ever had a real boyfriend, the life-partner of our dreams to share our ups and downs and protect our backs receded like a mirage in the desert the more we reached for it, at least we had each other.

Ayesha was once a famous drag artist and bemoaned the fact that she was no longer invited to perform at the Mardi Gras Party extravaganzas, she was sinking relentlessly into AIDs dementia, her costumes begrimed, daily looking more like Morticia badly in need of a shave, but she'd had thunderous applause and a thousand glorious fucks in her hey-day, she now let the young-guns hog the limelight, they'll learn the hard way that all that gliiters is not gold, and she had her lapdog, Yahoo, to keep her loyal company, fuck the adoring crowds.

And for all Peter's great talent, youth and beauty, he could never find a steady boyfriend, the pick-ups from gay venues like the Oxford Pub only toyed with him for a few days or weeks then dropped him for the next fling, superficiality still ruled, and he was let down by his own lust for rough-trade butch masculinity so that an adoring fan like Charles was not quite up to the mark. Poor Charles, for all his weight-lifting and swimming regimes, he remained a pudgy poof with a face like a camp Droopy the dog, and he always had half his dinner smeared down his daggy front, not very attractive.

And Sardine the trannie, forever bitching about morons in politics and the lack of style in the 'gay community', to me she comes across as damaged goods from too many drugs and a moribund career as a sex-worker, her femininity so razor-sharp and cutting she probably scared off prospective boyfriends, always teetering on the edge of destruction, getting more and more inebriated and addled as time wore on, she's notorious for flipping out and causing trouble, a put-off for everyone and not very attractive to real men in that L'Oreal "because you're worth it" sense. Too often told we're worthless, we have fought on, survived and achieved regardless. Lots of artists in history have been fatally flawed, suffering produces interesting art and much of CULTURE consists of our tortured, 'queer' contributions; anyway, at least we tried, delusions of grandeur are more glamorous than paranoid nihilism.

I don't have to say much about my own bent and fractured soul, it's all there to be read in my interminable Blog raves and, while FAME can go screw it's own vacuous black-hole, (it didn't do Elvis or Britney much good), I wouldn't mind a committed lover for I've never had a viable relationship either, too much of a crackpot narcissist and loner scumbag, I bullshit myself that I'm a godless new-age sadhu/sufi/taoist wanderer and have no need of a long-term companion in the flesh. But we fairies can still find other misfits to laugh and commiserate with, like at this party of the dispossessed, and that's better than Absolute Nothing, let the Parade pass us by and good riddance. To appreciate the moment and get sky high on it, that's something.

For me, this story shows the blues like bruises from a lifetime of battle, against predjudice, hate and brutality, screaming an intense pain that has no outlet except for bitchy jocularity. None of us at that party for grouches were bad people, we wouldn't hurt a soul, we worshipped love, fun and art, out of kilter and rejected by a society that makes money from war, degradation and disease, calling it economic growth. Over the last hundred years, politicians and lobbying industrialists have brought us all to the edge of destruction with bad policies and poisonous products, now they ask us to pay to clean up the mess while they continue to hog the best food, the classy whores, the stretch limmos and palatial mansions.

Worldwide, conservatives both left and right ignore the basic problem of a runaway population explosion, for they need that vast reservoir of slaves, consumers and cannon-fodder to fuel their elitist lifestyles, so easy to distract the masses with circuses, celebrities and religious nonsense, blaming 'gays' for decadence and civilisation's breakdown, when a major solution would be to encourage half the population to go 'gay', forget 'god' and live simple. Greed and stupidity rules, the world is being napalmed, pain shrieks from every byway, and humanity parties on regardless, let's consume it all now, fuck the future. It's a wonder we gay grouches are so hysterical, we dont even have grandchildren to worry about, but we are the world, we hurt.

And thus the midnight hour approached, we'd consumed all the intoxicants and wrecked Charle's flat, so we decided to venture out onto the streets to witness the aftermath of the Mardis Gras imbroglio. We wandered up to Taylor Square where the left-over celebrants staggered about, the peasants in their torn costumes who couldn't afford the party at the Horden pavillion, drunk girls sashaying about in loose bikini-tops, suburban rednecks in surf-shorts and thongs oggling the derelict fags, angry cops pushing befuddled revellors off the road, tramps kicking bottles and cans aside in search of lost drugs, and dread-locked hippies banging away on drums and blaring through trumpets while yowling punters frolicked and boogied to the beat, and I was reminded how Sydneysiders loved a wild party and will shake their booty at the merest tweet tweet of a whistle and thump thump of a bongo.

Myself, Charles and Peter ended up at the Flinders Pub, because it was free entry and looked to be happening. It was once a venue for all types of queers but in the last few years had been taken over by a "Bears Club", grossly fat, hairy men, virtually naked, strussed up in leather harnesses with a pseudo military edge, and we had to squeeze past their vast wobbly bellies and have their hairy, gorilla tits pressed into us as we pushed thru the crowd. But once we'd made it to the disco floor we let go of our inhibitions to the fabulous techno music and entered the paradise of Dance Abandoned, forgetting our differances, troubles, fears and desires, no need to cruise the morass of sweaty flesh, I let the Universe fuck me thru the music.

And I thought of all the poor souls in history who never got a chance to live and love, killed by wars, bigotry, disease and self-destruction, snuffed out before they realised they existed with open potential in a wondrous world, dead before they got to realise some of that potential. I felt rich, wise, celebrated and ecstatic in comparison, for all the shit, it was great to be alive and moving to the beat.

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