Ding-Dong The Pope Has Gone

IRISH WOMAN: Oh the Pope, God love him, it’s all taken it out of him, being Pope I mean. It must be so hard on him telling us all who to hate and who’s going to hell, and covering up for all those kiddy-fiddling priests. Well, what else has he done?

Above is a short piece I submitted to this week’s Newsjack Radio Show, unfortunately they didn’t use it but it does reflex my attitude to the Pope, Benedict XVI.

I’m no fan of this Pope, if you read back in this blog you can see that, but I was as surprised as anyone by his sudden resignation. When I first heard the news I actually though it was a joke, April the first come early. Since then I’ve watched the coverage of it by our media and I’ve been sickening by so much of it, especially the BBC. They were completely uncritical of the Pope, seeming to treat his resignation as the loss of one of our greatest human beings. They showed no one who wasn’t completely supportive of the Pope; decentring voices seemed to have been banned. So much for balanced broadcasting (I did complain but my voice seems to have been completely ignored, no decent allowed).

This Pope has not been a saint, by any means, and for anyone lesbian or gay, he’s been a homophobic monster. He seems to have gone out of his way to spout his homophobia. There is no other way to describe the things he’s said about us, lesbians and gay men. He’s described being gay as a greater threat to the world the global warming (!!) and that I am evil just because my sexuality is different, yet I’ve NEVER molested a child (Unlike many of his priests). He’s also said that marriage equality will lead to the end of the world and claimed condoms cause HIV infection. Yet he doesn’t even have the moral backbone to back up what he says with any sort of evidence, surely the mark of a bigot.

His actions have also backed up his homophobic words, as if there was any shortage of them. When his bishops compare marriage equality supporters to Nazis, he remains silent (Doesn’t he remember how homophobic the Nazis where or is that conveniently forgotten now?). When the Ugandan government announced their “Kill The Gays” bill (A law that would make being gay punishable by up to death and prison sentences for anyone who doesn’t turn in someone they know to be gay) the Pope reacted with the crassest of homophobia. He blessed Rebecca Kadaga, the Speaker of the Ugandan Parliament and the person behind “Kill The Gays” bill. I was left speechless by this, wanting to kill me is seen by him as a “blessing”.

Then there has been his reaction to the scandal of children being abused by catholic priests and other members of his church. So much of his career, before he became Pope, was take-up with covering up this scandal, and this didn’t change with his reign as Pope. He’s made a few, mealy-mouthed speeches about how “sorry” he is that this scandal happened, but that’s as far as it has gone. He hasn’t used the great resources of the Vatican to stop the abuse and expose the abusers, he certainly hasn’t turned over the extensive Vatican records to the authorities to help catch these abusers, nor has he given any resources over to helping the victims of this abuse. He has blamed homosexuality for this abuse, when the evidence is the opposite, and refused to allow any discuss around the forced celibacy of priests which has added to this abuse.

Also, the recent abuse scandals in Belgium, Australian and Holland all show that there has been no change in the Catholic Church’s policy of covering up abuse at all costs.

The Pope has repeatedly spoken out against “secularism”, making it sound more organised and dangerous then Communism and Nazism combined. What organised secularism? Where’s his evidence of this? We’re never told. Though, this all sounds as sourer grapes to me. As the Catholic Church has lost power in the West so we’ve seen the exposure of its sins, especially the industrial cover-up of child abuse.

Still people talk about all the “good” this Pope has done, but what I want to know is where? I’ve seen nothing but hate and repression coming from this Pope and his church. There has been a lot of talk, especially on the BBC, about how charming and intelligent the Pope is. I’ve never seen that. All I’ve seen is his ignorant hate spilling forward at any opportunity.

So, the Pope-n-Hater will be gone by the end of the month, therefore shouldn’t I be hopeful that the next one will be an improvement? Afraid not. This Pope has appointed over half of the cardinals who’ll pick the next pope. So, more of the same is on the way.

I can hope that the whole of the Catholic Church, rotten to its core, implodes on itself. Now, that would be worth seeing.

Drew.

Sex & Romance (Sort Of)

Last week I returned home from work to find that our front door would only part open; a parcel was stuck under it as I tried to open the door. This happens all too often. I arrive home before Martin (My hours mean I always finish work before he does) and often have to climb over the post behind our front door, parcels often get stuck under the door. It was nothing new for me having ease the front door open, trying not to damage the parcel that was stuck there, but it’s a real pain when it’s cold and wet outside and all I want to do is to get into the warmth of our home.

Finally inside, I saw that the parcel was for me and it was a book, but I hadn’t bought any books recently. When I opened it I found it was a copy of Boys In Bed, a collection of erotic gay short stories, and the fifth story in it is by me, Two in the Bed.

This is one of the best moments of being published, the moment when I receive my writer’s copy of the published work, the book or magazine that’s sent to me as part of my payment for my writing. That new, clean copy of the book with my name there inside of it. Once I have it held in my hands then I know for sure it’s real, I’ve been published and other people will be able to read what I’ve written, majority of them don’t know me and will never meet me.

I submitted my story to this anthology last year and, to my surprise and delight it was accepted. The story’s about a guy who wakes up, one Saturday morning, next to another guy in his bed. It’s about how they got there and what happens next, it could be described as the nearest thing I’ve written to romantic fiction.

Being in an erotic anthology there’s sex in the story, and that was the hardest part to write (no pun intended). There is a lot of bad sex writing out there, an awful lot, so I was very careful not to fall into many of the clichés of it. I tried to concentrate on the characters, especially the character of the narrator, and tried to make to the story realistic but still exciting. I hope I succeed; I did succeed enough for the editor of Boys in Bed to want to publish it.

You can judge for yourself because Boys In Bed is now available, either directly from its publisher HERE, or from Amazon HERE. It does contain sexually explicit material, but then that’s obvious.

 

Happy reading.

Drew.

Read Me On Amazon!

Finished By Hand (an Xcite Books collection of five erotic m/m stories) was published three days ago on Amazon and my short story, Two in a Bed, is one of those stories. I nearly screamed with delight when I saw it!

This is the first time anything I have written has been available on Amazon and it’s amazingly exciting. So many different people can have access to it and read it and, hopefully, enjoy it, and to the vast majority of them I’ll only be a name on a page. It’ll be my writing that they will see and I love that thought. I also love that people think my writing is good enough to be published in this collection.

My story, Two in a Bed, is about two old school friends re-connecting, years later, and finding they have a shared attraction, which they had back at school, and finally acting on it. It’s about acting on those on a long ago and secret teenage crush. Often in fiction, this would be a tragedy, the object of the character’s crush rejecting him, but here it’s a little more positive and with a lot more sex (!!).

This is also an erotic story and so there is a lot of sex in it, and that was the hardest part (NO pun intended) to write. I find sex scenes so difficult to write because it’s so easy to get them wrong. Write it in porn-style, all in-and-out and unrealistic activity, and it sounds shallow and does nothing with the characters. Over write it, all hearts and flower and euphemisms for body parts, and it’s laughable (They have awards for bad sex writing for a reason!). I try to concentrate on the characters and what they want or expect from sex, what is going through their mind during this sex, and I try to keep the sex within a realistic story (Most porn certainly seems to ignore this!). I hope it works.

Anyway, if you want you can judge for yourself. Finished By Hand can be downloaded here. If you hurry you can download it for free, for the next couple of days, otherwise you will have to the full price of £1.28…

Happy reading.

Drew.

Frankenstein on Screen

Four days ago we went to see the National Theatre’s production of Frankenstein, staring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, but we didn’t see it at the theatre.

Earlier this year the National Theatre broadcast a live transition of Frankenstein into different cinemas around the country. Four days ago they re-broadcast it and we wert to see it, at the Vue cinema Dagenham.

The production was amazing and full of the theatre magic the National Theatre does so well. The play was written and performed from the point of view of The Creature, rather than Frankenstein, and opened with the painful and disorientating “birth” of The Creature. It portrayed him as someone driven to revenge and murder by the complete rejection he suffers from society just because of his looks. Whereas it portrayed Frankenstein as the arrogant scientist who creates life and then does not know how to handle that responsibility, he’d driven The Creature away as a “mistake” after its birth because it was so deformed, and there he hoped it had died. When The Creature returned to his life, Frankenstein can’t cope with the reasonability of what he’d done.

Benedict Cumberbatch played The Creature as someone trying to regain speech and movement after a brain injury. Jonny Lee Miller played Frankenstein as a strutting and arrogant man laid low by what he has done.

The production was magical and so tightly held our attention, yet it never stopped to preach a “message” at us, instead it concentrated on its dark and gothic story, letting the morality flow out of the story. It also stuck very closely to the plot of Mary Shelley’s book. This wasn’t a simple horror story, but a dark fable about the dangers of science.

The strangest thing, though, was our setting. The Vue Dagenham is a very suburban cinema, mostly showing Hollywood Blockbusters. For that screening of Frankenstein there was only Martin and I in the whole auditorium, which seated about two hundred people. I’ve never been the only person in a cinema before, it felt also decadent, but it also felt a little sad (We were the only people in the area taking the time to see this great production). What we didn’t feel was alone. Frankenstein had been filmed before a sell out audience and we could hear the audience’s reaction to the play. With surround sound it actually felt as if the cinema had a full audience, people laughed at the humour and gasped at the horror.

You can find out more about the National Theatre Live (live broadcasts of their productions) at their website.

Drew.

Anthropomorphosis Me

We give human traits and personalities to animals and even inanimate objects, its part of our human make up. Claiming our car has human emotions when the damn thing won’t start, or claiming that our dog can understand every word we say, not just “sit” and “food”. I’m certainly not above it, my imagination is very good at doing this.

Last week, we drove into a car park to be greeted by a flock of crows occupying one corner of it. There were about ten to fifteen of them and they were just standing there, not moving and not trying to fly away. There were no cars parked in that area either.

The crows had such a threatening and malevolent presence to them, like a gang of evil thugs guarding their territory. They’d have cut your throat for just looking at them the wrong way. They made me think of East End gangsters, nasty and not to be crossed.

Those crows might have been the most gentle and friendly of birds but their jet black feathers, all the extra and uniform shade of black, their strutting and arrogance stance, simply marked them out as malevolent.

Stood there, in the corner of that car park, the shear presence of those crows pressed themselves into my memory. What were they guarding? Whose evil thugs were they? Who had sent them there and why?

Welcome to my world, were the simplest of sights can set my imagination off into some strange and fanciful places.

Drew.

And Her Lips Never Moved

Last night we saw Nina Conti, at Menier’s Chocolate Factory, in her new show, Dolly Mixture. She’s a ventriloquist (She's also Tom Conti's daughter) but her show was much more adult entertainment than children’s party.

Her show consisted of six different puppets, all of them very different. There was the tactless monkey, Monk, who has made Nina Conti’s names, plus five new characters; her eight year old daughter, her reformed rescue dog, a randy polish builder, her Irish Aunt who has reached the age where she no longer gives a f*ck and one of her old professors who has lived so long that he doesn’t want to have to carry on living any longer. The humor here was very adult, plenty of jokes about sex and even death, and not once did she drink a glass of water while the puppet chatted on.

This was certainly a “work in process” show, some of the characters/puppets didn’t work as well as others and some of the humor didn’t as flow as smoothly in some places, but still it was far better than a lot of comedy I’ve been exposed to; it made me laugh. Nina Conti certainly has an eye and an ear for characters, but unusual characters. Her puppets aren’t the standard stereotypes beloved of traditional ventriloquists, they were far too off-the-wall.

As a child I’d never warmed to ventriloquists, they were always very clever but the puppets never seemed to come alive with their characters. This was the nineteen-seventies and we still had the tradition of Music Hall and Working Men’s clubs. Ventriloquists fell into the traditional double-act, a straight-man who feed the feed-lines to the comic, the ventriloquist being the straight-guy and the doll was the comic. Their routines were that of line joke, line joke, line joke; their routines weren’t the character driven stories that was the main stay of Nina Conti’s show.

To Nina Conti her puppets were more than just props on her knee, she interacted with them. She made eye contact with them, reacted to them, she even laughed at their comments, but she was far more than the straight-man feeding lines for the jokes. At times it felt as if she didn’t know what the puppet was going to say, even though she’d obviously worked closely on her show. She has taken character driven comedy and applied it to the ventriloquist act, giving us something fresh and interesting.

I have always enjoyed character driven comedy over stand-up joke telling, the jokes coming out of a character’s reaction to a situation, rather than the smart put-downs of a comic. Nina Conti certainly performs the comedy I enjoy and she has breathed life into the stale old ventriloquist’s act.

Watch some videos of Nina Conti’s act here, on YouTube.

Drew

Something Important

“I hope my Equal Marriage film wakes us all up to support changing the law.” Mike Buonaiuto, director of the above film.

All my life I’ve just wanted equality. Not special treatment, not favoritism, not any “gay agenda”; I’ve just wanted the same rights as everyone else.

When I was in my twenties I dreamed of equality, it seemed so far away. The government, of the day, called same-sex relationships “pretend family relationships”, the Prime Minister said no one had a “right” to be gay and they passed a law making it illegal to “promote” homosexuality. All this cheered on, with disguising levels of homophobia, by the newspapers, the church and the establishment.

Today things have changed, but not everything is equal, by any means.

The government has introduced plans for Equal Civil Marriage. We have Civil Partnerships but they didn’t give all the protections that Civil Marriage does. This isn’t about special “Gay Marriage” or about “watering down marriage”, and certainly isn’t an attack on any religion; it’s about equality pour and simple. But already the bigots and homophobes are circling and making these claims, and worse, and they are making their voices heard, even though they only speak for a minority.

Please help and make your voice heard.

There’s an Official Home Office survey on the introduction of equal civil marriage, which can be filled out online here. I’ve done so, because I know the bigots are already filling it in.

There’s also the Coalition for Equal Marriage, and their website can be found here. They have a petition you can sign and lots more resources.

The bigots are already out there with their lies and doctored statists, please don’t let them win.

Drew.