I, Pillow-Biter

I am sitting here at the Sidewalk Cafe at one of the sessions of the pretentious SASOD Spectrum Film Festival, ignoring what I had expected to be a nice lipstick lesbian flick like Better than Chocolate but which turned out instead to be some sappy, sensitive coming of age film about a normal looking teen carpet-muncher - the sort of mediocre, pseudo-artistic crap that my friend the Silver Dragon would love to rip apart.

What I find myself actually doing is backing the screen to observe every limp-wristed, tight t-shirt-wearing, pencil-jeans parading, prissy-mouthed butt-pirate that sashays languorously into the underwhelmingly attended screening. What am I doing? It's called research.

Years ago, in my mid-teens, I read an amazingly decadent novel called The Dice Man which featured a main character, a psychiatrist, who decides to live his life by the decisions made on the throw of some dice. In one chapter the dice tell him to go into a gay bar and pick up someone, and then to be the one who takes it up the ass. The entire next chapter basically goes something like, "Ouch. That was painful."

That was my first encounter with male homosexuality in literature - I started reading Longarm novels from the age of six, I shit you not, so I was well versed in lesbian scenes in writing. I have read a couple of books since then which featured gay or bisexual male characters, including a couple of novels by Brett Easton Ellis.

And during my research days on Ariadne & Other Stories and The Enormous Night, I often encountered a book of homosexual verse in the National Library. Better than the poems was the ongoing debate taking place on the whitespace at the back of the book, about the morality of homosexuality and the relevance of the book in the library. I used to leave the book on the table all the time and was guaranteed to find someone adding their written position for or against in the decreasing space at the back of the book.

The masterpiece of fag literature I have read in recent times is actually a story written by a friend of mine, Kei Miller, called The Fear of Stones. In setting out to write Fictions, I decided to make the central character of one story, A History of Phlegm, a "gay homosexual" in the terminology of South Park.

A good friend of mine once told me that I was a repressed homophobe, which I guess means that I only pretend to be tolerant of pillow-biting, knob-gobblers but I actually don't like them. The thing is, homosexual men make me uncomfortable, not because that I perceive them as a threat to my sexuality, but simply because the thought of two men being intimate with each other is disgusting to me.

I like lesbians, the cute ones, because "A little cunnilingus, a little bingo never hurt anybody." And unlike my friend the Insomniac Slacker, I am not sure that I am would be turning down a threesome with two bisexual women too quickly. I might do it for the academic value of it all.

With A History of Phlegm I intend to create an entirely credible gay character but God knows that it wouldn't be a comfortable experience for me. Trying to get into the head of a heterosexual woman in April was a tough enough job, and I love women.