Gay = Shit. Bauer. GScene Magazine. January 2014.

Gay = Shit.

Anyone who knows my work also knows that I’m a stickler for all devious language and hidden context; of how the uber-right hide their meanings behind the agendas they so neatly posit in their language. And how claiming of the language first (e.g. pro-life) automatically makes everyone else the opposite (anti-life). What Shakespeare used to call a ‘jade’s trick’.


But should we actually use the word ‘Gay’ anymore?
It is the G of the LGBT acronym, after all. We have gay men and Lesbians. Trans can encompass an entire array of statuses, always fluid, because to be in a state of trans is exactly as it sounds, no matter where you are on the trans spectrum. Everyone represented under the LGBT umbrella is supposed to also be within Queer but queer ‘others’ are in there too. If we think of the globe being run by predominantly white straight men, anyone who isn’t the straight white male version, is therefore queer. This makes the numbers of queers far greater than that of straight white men, making queers the majority.

As you all know Homosexuality has been around longer than Heterosexuality.

Don’t believe me? Well, when the jolly Victorians needed a ‘label’ for low-life male fellators, they came up with the term Homosexual. Some time later they needed to come up with a term for ‘Everybody else’ and this is when heterosexuality was actually born - somewhere in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately for the world, this means that Homosexuality is older than Heterosexuality, but then - at the end of the day – it’s just labels.

As with our queer sexualities, we define ourselves as we see fit, so if I chose to call myself a sleazy cum-bucket faggot, that’s my choice.
And since context is everything, if we hear someone screaming about a bunch of low life faggots on a 1960’s newsreel we know what it really means. I have no problem referring to myself as a dirty stinking rotten filthy homo because at the end of the day, I’m really the only one who knows this is actually true. When anyone else says it, it becomes another label.

Gay icons are something entirely different. They are something we are collectively supposed to adore and consume. Madonna and Lady GaGa keep the argument going -just think of the revenue loss if they didn’t. In fact without ‘gay’ in their lexicon, these gals wouldn’t get another pay check. But this ‘Gay iconography’ isn’t me - so what happens if I don’t identify as that kind of gay. The fact is, quite a lot of my own ‘gay’ icons are actually straight. In fact, there are only small elements within my gay icons that actually speak to me - not the whole package.

So is it the ‘Gay’ industries that are worried that the very word ‘gay’ is being cheapened by a bunch of school kids? How are you going to sell a ‘gay lifestyle’ when you’re really selling a ‘crap lifestyle’ or whatever the new definition is. Answer – don’t sell a ‘gay’ life style in the first place. It’s a capitalist construct!

One of my favorite Gay Icons was a man called Vladimir Lenin. And just because he’s not in the back pages of certain magazines doesn’t mean to say he’s not a gay icon. In fact I challenge anyone whose ever seen his embalmed body in the Mausoleum in Red Square to tell me otherwise, I’ve seen some bad make-up jobs in my time, but this is real K-hole stuff. Now, Lenin famously said that Capitalism eats everything in its path, it consumes everything and then shits out its own version. Now, I don’t want to sound like the last commie standing but the organisers of Pride might benefit from some early 20th century political reading. Pride is about money and, since gay icons such as Madonna and the rest are also about money and consuming cultures before regurgitating them as their own, I think it’s a marriage made in heaven/hell.

Maybe it’s good for the LGBT acronym to fall. We’ve already left out intersex and a whole host of personal gender sexuality definitions, anyhow. The fact of the matter is that we’ve crammed ourselves in the same closet for so long as a matter of survival, we surely can’t expect the low-life underground boudoir to remain closed.
I think the greatest indicator of this failure is the silent ‘B’ and the bi-phobia that exists both within and outside of the LGBT barricades. Just like Victorian England where Lesbians were never even acknowledged, it leads us back to the fact that the word ‘Gay’ is a means of offence – a male insult thrown only at other males.

A few years ago I wrote an article about how I met Quentin Crisp when he was touring with his Evening with Quentin Crisp show and ended up in my hometown. Thirty people turned up of which I, still a schoolboy, was one. After the show I sat in the foyer with Quentin and talked. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was inadvertently asking him what the whole gay thing meant.

I’ve often wondered if he made it up there and then when he told me that GAY was actually a political term, something that carried a coded meaning. He told me that codes and metaphors were to become a new language for me within my new sexual identity - it was, after all, the coded language of my history. He told me that GAY actually stood for ‘Good As You’. Important words to a seventeen-year-old. So I’m calling for all Gay Pride events to now be named ‘Good As You festivals’ in honor of our dear Quentin.


Click on link below for published version:

Gay = Shit. Bauer. GScene Magazine. Jan 2014

Digital Jesus. Charlie Bauer PhD. Gscene. December 2013

Digital Jesus.

Of the countless reasons why religion and homosexuality don’t mix, the most striking is the use of language around the thorny imagery of what people do to each other in bed. Or in the bushes. Or in the sauna. Apparently, the Catholic Church - the greatest finger pointer, even of the twenty-first century, must have some idea of what we queers get up to. Surely those naughty thoughts and images must predicate every argument and damnation they have about being Queer? After all, homosexuality is a sin that would have to be first ‘imagined’ by everyone in this particular belief system – a system whose wealth has been syphoned around what are referred to as ‘the areas of systematic abuse of the unrepresented’ All, apparently, by gods own representatives, themselves.

The first childhood seduction is the church itself. The building, the effect on the senses, the candlelight, the shadows; images of love, beauty and pain juxtaposed within the same version of religious iconography, the confusion that results. The profusion of writhing naked bodies, Christ being merely one, only compound this confusion of the carnal and the spiritual.

But religious imagery and terminology have been proven to be the most potent of marketing tools. As a system of control with its roots embedded firmly in the fifth century, Christianity hasn’t done that badly at all. Speaking from my post-capitalist pulpit, I can trace it’s diversification into all forms of power, from the broken Nazi crucifix, the Swastika, chosen for similar reasons, to the burning crosses of the KKK (Angry ‘hot’ anonymous Christians).

Now we’ve arrived at the god to end all gods. Actual (not ‘spiritual’) surveillance by an omniscient form that requires no belief for its operating system - other than the purchasing of expensive hardware for a system that does not require fear but compliance. We now genuflect to the techno computer god where you air your confessionals openly and are required to have them distributed and reinterpreted across the cyber heavens.

It was an obvious extension of this for crypto-hippies like Steve Jobs, to incorporate similar religious language into Apple’s own ‘System of Control’ - the Macintosh. At its inception, inappropriate computer terminology like ‘icon’ and ‘font’ were bandied about and are still in use today. Back then, if two computers were to communicate with each other they had to be ‘blessed’ first – the equivalent of obtaining a WiFi password today. Now of course we have Mac Temples in every city where we can talk to genius priests as the cult spreads without end.

Of course, of all the major methods of obtaining our information, Facebook in particular doesn’t rely on cow-towing to the great god Zuckerberg - he merely observes with passing glances as the Shakespearian and Machiavellian narratives play out around him. And since everything is stored, we no longer have the need to confess or even be corrected. In fact, the NSA and GCHQ assure us about the element of ‘freedom’ from having to defending ourselves. Nevertheless, both Zuckerberg and Jobs between them command(ed) more respect than Christ and God the Father combined.

Do these gods have a doctrine? Are the Christians rebelling against Zuckerberg for usurping godly control? Of course not. Did Steve Jobs have an adverse or negative opinion of Homosexuality? I very much doubt it – as long as everyone accessed their depravities on a piece of his hardware, he couldn’t give a flying pixel. The new god technology had already moved on from what people do or don’t do with their bodies – the real currency lies in what they do with their minds.  It’s a bit like Descartes never died - I tweet therefore I am. After all, they can already guess what the Homos do with their bodies by their behavior and what they say online. Euck – close that window for gawd’s sake - the world’s looking in at us.

I think the writer Christopher Bryant nailed it recently when he stated that Homosexuality is a fact of nature whereas Christianity is a lifestyle choice. This is the final inversion of a system of control that has gone on far too long already. Technology has played its part by expanding this system of thought, from the original AOL queer ‘Romper Rooms’ which gave voices a new internationalism, to proving that the Turin shroud could have once a table cloth in a brothel.

What we are seeing now (via the new holy father) is apparently a corporate disowning of homo-hating by the Catholic Church. This isn’t because all those poor boys were actually once ordained because they were gay; but rather that inclusivity for a dying system needs all the help and financial support it can muster. The race for mind control has finally been lost by Christianity and won by technology. And as soon as a new hateful sect appears over the course of a decade or so, a counter movement can crush it in a single computer posting. Praise the lords.

Anyway, I have no responsibility over a Christian’s lifestyle choice, just leave me with what is, and always has been, a totally natural sexual identity. However I chose to define that.

Click on link below for published version:

Digital Jesus. Bauer. Gscene. December 2013

AIDS IN AMERICA. Charlie Bauer Phd. Gscene Magazine. November 2013

Aids in America.

I’ve been asked to write something about HIV and AIDS for this month’s publication. I have to say the very subject I’m most adamant about has remained dormant in my brain for some time now. Why? Are there fewer cases being diagnosed? Has global health care come to meet the HIV community with some sort of financial treaty? Are our UK needs different from everyone else’s? Is HIV care non-racial? Non political?

While you’re considering all the ‘no’ answers, cast your mind back to a previous article when I reaffirmed the anger expressed by the global care community at the World Aids conference in Washington DC only last year. Ever since my brain has been lodged deeply in US policy.

We’re having a financial meltdown in the UK about ‘disability’ and how to fund the growing needs as people begin to live longer. As we know, the Cameron government is in the process of attempting to alleviate us of much of this state aid. In the US, the question also remains about money over care. I’ve been bleating on about the legal scam of drug companies taking medications off-patent immediately after new drugs become ‘available’ (see AIDS conference above); I’ve given you drills about the rise in infection globally using the US as a research barometer. And some of you have questioned why I constantly seem to push US data into everything national.

Don’t forget how American policy has affected the planet. Rich and poor - no one is ever exempt from its reach. I’ve been castigated in the past because I’ve always thought the US elections should be open to the world, since everyone is ultimately affected.

My first requests for global US elections came about as a teenager in the late 70’s, in the Cold War days when both America and Russia were using Europe as a battlefield. Back then they called it ‘Theatre Warfare’ and there were at least two nuclear missile sites within close proximity of my hometown. So, my house actually became a target - not necessarily because of a nuclear strike but of potential air attacks in order to disable these US bases. Therefore, irrespective of any ability to vote in the US elections, its foreign policy had everything to do with my life.

The effect of lack of valid foreign policy reportage hit the American people without ‘educational’ exemption on 9/11.  This was the day that every American understood the importance of what someone else might be thinking and this time - it wasn’t the good stuff. Of course any reasoning Americans who previously questioned US foreign policy had been largely ignored - from The Black List to the Vietnam war. But 9/11 put a rocket up everyone ass - the non-questioning red republican centre of the country who couldn’t understand why anyone could hate them so much - and the blue democrat coastal edges who questioned how such a primitive act would be allowed to destabilize an entire country. (Yes, I do mean primitive, as in Trojan Horse primitive, which is exactly what it was).

The rest of the world’s concerns were about what George ‘Dubbya’ Bush’s knee-jerk reaction would be and, although he didn’t nuke-anyone, he eventually side-stepped the UN in order to enter a war that was universally condemned. School kids defiantly took to the streets of Sydney, Mothers joined hands in a show of peaceful solidarity, Tony Blair twitched live on-air when it came to the lack of any evidence of weapons of mass destruction. But Bush continued to listen only to the people who had elected him back home - against the opinion of swathes of sane Americans and the rest of the world - where US foreign policy had been enforced since WW2.

What’s it all got to do with AIDS, you may ask. Well, those people in America - the hicks who now stand tall on the podium of ‘The Tea Party’, are the ones who are opposing affordable health care or ‘Obamacare’ as its become known.

Great, you say again, but what’s this to do with AIDS.

Well, Obamacare is generally going to benefit only the bottom rung, low-earning, 15 percent of the American population. Any idea who they might be?

I lived in West Hollywood in the early 90’s. I lived there because I ticked all the boxes to live there. White, gay identified, (occasionally) Single, consumer of luxury food and goods, US standard middle class income, home-owner and the rest. It was when I volunteered to work on an AIDS outreach programme, that I discovered that the contributions made, never found their way back into the gay community. No sir, all the food, clothes and financial contributions went thankfully to the people who needed them most – mainly to the Black communities of Los Angeles such as South Central; a place where the people couldn’t afford the health care they needed - even though they were on a par, numbers wise, with the Gay white male population when it came to rates of HIV care.

Current high HIV infection rates and the lowest 15% of American earners have a lot in common these days. In twenty years the demographic has changed and now includes the LGBT community as one of the most impoverished within the USA. The question remains about the markets that finance the drug companies and who re-patent drugs keeping prices inflated and out of everyone’s reach. (Don’t forget it’s possible to get HIV medication down to $100 per person, per year). The elevated cost of HIV medication has an immediate effect on global drug administration - which then has an effect on the cost of care in the United Kingdom. This in turn has an immediate effect on the price of medications when it comes to the new ‘South Central’ of the world – Africa. 

To read the published version click on the link below:

AIDS IN AMERICA. Charlie Bauer Phd. Gscene Magazine. November 2013

The Gay Gulag. Charlie Bauer PhD. GScene magazine. October 2013

The Gay Gulag.

As I write this Russia ducks and dives with its ideology about all things ‘gay’ based around what people will or won’t be allowed to do at the Sochi Olympics. What’s really interesting is the ghostly spectre of Thatcher’s very own Section 28 on the horizon, prompting the removal of any ‘propaganda’ about ‘nontraditional’ sexual relations around minors.

I still find it remarkable, after all these years that it always leads back to money and church-endorsed primitivism.  Until recently this obsession was only a fixture in the British psyche thanks to the likes of Rebekah Brooks and her ‘Name and Shame’ campaigns, stating that gay men and child abuse somehow walk hand in hand at the edge of the sand together. However, operation Yewtree is still no heterosexual corrective - a witch hunt is a witch hunt, after all. However, all this one-upmanship between Murdoch (phone tapping) the BBC (pedophiles) and the Guardian (protecting whistleblowers) is grinding them all down into the same hole of lies. So where is good honest, informed journalism to be found thesedays?

Since we’re now used to constant lies within our own media, lets bring our minds to the former communist countries constant lying because they can always bend state data. This is also why any information generated by the Russian government must be treated as fabrications. And as the newly ‘emerging’ economic nations crumble, India, Brazil and Russia – we wait, wincing, to see the toll across the board regarding queer rights.

I was first (and last) in Russia in 1997 for three long, miserable months.  On my free days I’d wander around the Gumm store opposite the Kremlin and observe the immaculate storekeepers guarding a single Tefal toaster in a display case.  Back then, this is what new economies represented for this country; a beige toaster. This, to them, was Western aspirationalism – standing by, ready to pounce at consumerism. It was also the time when America was tentatively dipping their toes into the Russian economy. Occasionally, in the Banya, I’d listen to the tales of woe from the American businessmen who’d just managed to hand over every cent of their investment capital to the Siberian Mafia. The entire country, it seemed, was operating a huge scam.  

For two months I researched any form of Gay activity and hit Iron Curtain after Iron Curtain. Eventually, I broke down and pleaded with the receptionist behind the front desk of the Metropol Hotel, where I was interned for duration of my stay.

Since I was a foreigner and paying in dollars, I got special privileges - she winked and

slid me a piece of paper, telling me to make sure that I went with a driver.

That Friday I arrived at ‘The Three Monkeys’, Moscow’s, nay Russia’s, first-ever gay club. Situated in the upstairs of what looked like a suburban house, the place was packed with everyone bouncing along to a miasma of retro hits including Dean Martin. What was most interesting, because there was no real ‘queer history’ throughout communism, was the clientele, noticeably that everyone was aged between teens and mid 70’s – a completely even mix. In one corner I saw the hotel receptionist smoking a huge Cuban cigar in the company of a group of older women - cigar smoking apparently a public sign of lesbianism. Images of Beryl Reid and Susannah George swirled around my head and I immediately fell in love with this innocent heaven.

After an evening of being cruised by men of all ages, it occurred to me that there were no real distinctions at The Three Monkeys. Here there were no presold western conventions, no gay histories of colored hankies, no sexual style definitions, no transgender divides, no David Bowie - just a new burgeoning identity and community without a blueprint. It made me think that, no matter how free I thought I was growing up in covert homosexualand of the UK, this was something I’d never seen before. While the 20^th century liberated the west, here the closet stretched out as long as perestroika allowed it.

These people had invented the culture themselves, a culture with no exclusivity or cliques, so prevalent in so-called western sophistication. Here, in Russia of all places, were the freest gay people I’d ever come across. I raised a toast of neat Vodka with the receptionist and felt the most liberated I’ve felt in my life.

Now Russia has resorted back to its dark past. Not its communist past - it would never give up those western aspirations and luxuries for anyone – it needs the money so it’s self deception runs even deeper. Stalin hid genocide behind communism without a care of what the world thought about it. Putin cannot, he and his church funded regime are fully exposed. We hope that, as Russia falls, he will become desperate and start to weaken but no longer at the expense of human rights.

As I write this, yet again the rules have been bent regarding the Sochi winter Olympics. This week Putin is attempting to ease concerns that the new anti-gay laws will be used to punish athletes who display rainbow colors at the event. He now insists that gay people are not discriminated against in Russia, and that he sometimes even awards them with ‘prizes and decorations.’ Then he mentions Tchaikovsky and the fact that they all love his music.

But it’s true, the videos we’re seeing from the garden squares and the Prospekts showing gay and trans people being beaten - but only by local hooligans. But as they say, if you strike the shepherd the sheep will scatter. The sheep in this case will be Putin’s hooligans, hot on the heels of the church.

Click on link below for published version:

The Gay Gulag: Free Russia. Gscene magazine. October. 2013

Burn Hollywood Burn. Bauer. GScene magazine. September 2013

Burn Hollywood Burn


When asked about ‘Realism’ in the movies, the writer Dorothy Parker famously replied “The only ‘ism’ Hollywood believes in is ‘Plagiarism’”

Hiding all things Queer in Hollywood has gone on since the first moving images were recorded. By the time the 1933 Greta Garbo ‘Queen Christina’ movie about a lesbian monarch was released, there was anything but a whiff of dykery to be seen. This was even a full year before they would legally have to put the queer reins on with the hysterically titled 1934 ‘Legion of Decency’ code. Eventually, a plethora of other ‘issues’ were needed to mask Queer themes to keep them away from the ‘easily offended’. The problem became how to get around the ‘Homo problem’ and still maintain a high level of drama and persecution.

In the movie Crossfire, they turned all the queer-bashing and murder from the book into anti-Semitism. Same thing, apparently. Same with ‘The Lost Weekend’ when Ray Milland morphed from a man wrestling with his sexual identity, into that of a raging alcoholic - well, if the glove fits… Thank goodness we live in more evolved times.

Isn’t it great that we now have movies like ‘Milk’ and ‘Brokeback Mountain’ to finally weigh up those old queer scores? Isn’t it groovy that the mainstream has finally embraced Queer culture? And how swell it is when films like ‘Malcolm X’ fore-front issues of contemporary black identity and remind the world that the struggle is far from over. And that ‘Shindlers’ List’ is actually an eternal reminder of what happens when the hatred of a single race acquires a political platform?

I actually think that all these films should be part of an enforced global school curriculum to keep all the haters and revisionists at bay. Unless there is ever going to be a Gay Nation of Islam remake of Malcolm X, that is.

And I’m not saying that boardroom Hollywood is homophobic. Not xenophobic, sexist, racist, anti-Muslim either. But Hollywood has never been the pioneer of the underdog. The saying goes that there is no ‘Pink’ dollar’ in Hollywood, and no ‘Black’ dollar either. In Hollywood there is only THE dollar, and whoever walks in the door with it gets to stay. And when there is no money honey, there is no Hollywood selling someone’s idea of freedom. And so Hollywood falls.

Since the Internet has taken hold, Hollywood has become nothing more than a slow money grab - just take a look at the garbage it churns out today. The only bonus being that, since Hollywood no longer controls distribution, (hurrah to Netflix) other narratives are free to spread. Great for us, sad for the executives who now have to find someone else to fleece.

In the current post-capitalist period, Hollywood has even more to get it just ‘right’ - the right combination of sex, violence, ambiguity etc. so that they can get the maximum audience into the cinema seats. The real prize is getting an audience where grandpa takes grandson to the cinema – meaning that the product can be sold to everyone in between. But increasingly, if any films don’t fill these quadrants, i.e. have ‘minority subjects’ like Queers in them - then they just don’t get financed. Unless Matt Damon agrees to star, that is. This is why there’s so much shite at your local Multiplex and why Lucas and Spielberg have been freaking out stating that; if a few more $200 million movies fold, then it’ll be the end of $200 million dollar movies. Bring it on, I say.

But it’s not only about the Dorothy Parker plagiarism issues and stealing of ideas - it’s also the ‘normalizing’ of those ideas where the damage really lies. Let’s face it if Hollywood could get away with turning Nelson Mandela white, they’d book Leonardo DiCaprio in advance.

Even in its demise, Hollywood is still viewed as being all about good ideas and a platform for the people whose voices have been suppressed. Realistically any real trace of this went away with the blacklist. And I’m not being hypothetical here.  In addition, a colleagues serialized novel, ‘The man who,’ has been withdrawn from this magazine for ongoing legal reasons. This ‘gay’ story written ten years ago (and lifted five years later) has become the latest chapter of heterosexualised Hollywood. Yes, the gay sperm donor and all the complications surrounding him all those years ago, has now become not only straight but indeed anal – if only to get more bums on seats. (Make your own decision whether you prefer the ‘homosexual’ book or the ‘heterosexual’ film later this year). But either way thank god it will be one of the last Hollywood movies you’ll probably ever see. Besides the slated remake of ‘Lassie’ which goes into production next year, that is.

When I say that Hollywood has lost control of their distribution model to the internet, read it as everyone else’s ‘artistic freedom’. It means any of us can make a movie that has a chance of becoming a hit. And there are enough sassy, queer, off-Hollywood films in production - Michael Urie’s ‘Such Good People’ springs to mind - to keep us all going. So, as the studios struggle to keep up the heterosexual front end, the queers are doing what we know best – using the back door. For those at the top, it’s well and truly over because there’s finally a drive from the ‘bottom up’ and sometimes, as we all know, that hurts like hell. So, let’s welcome the new underdog movies that are surfacing, offering us all a different ‘Queer.’

To read the magazine version click the link below:

BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN. BAUER. GSCENE MAGAZINE. SEPTEMBER 2013