AIDS IS DEAD! Bauer. GScene Magazine. April 2014.

AIDS IS DEAD!

This is an unpaid advertisement

A great sadness is upon us.

It’s official. Aids is no more. It has no life. It means nothing. Zilch. A waste of time. The debate is over. Even the acronym needs a well-needed once-over. But it’s already too late. Who wants to know about this anymore? Who cares? We’re devastated.

Thank the lord above, we’ve now moved on from HIV and AIDS. The money just isn’t in it anymore. It’s a lousy investment. Like Detroit with cars, or the UK with higher education, the ass has well and truly fallen out of the industry.

I’m not suggesting that we, the drug companies, are placing anything else into the sexual activity market. God forbid. But we have a new buzz-word that we’re all really getting off on back here on campus. We click our fingers, wink and point to each other in the corridors; high five each other at the urinals, whispering the new name on everyone’s pension cheques – HEP C. Even the sound on the lips makes our grandkids bank account soar.

We’re not sorry about the HIV community – how could we be  - Hello! you sent our kids to summer camps and Ivy league universities for nearly thirty freekin’ years! Then you stupidly began to live, and we had to limit our store accounts and Lexus leases. But we’re not bitter. Although, I sometimes wonder why we should show you any sympathy when we actually saved your lives - yet you still talk about us so bad? But we know what forgiveness is. Here, we don’t believe in bitterness – it’s all just too negative. Sometimes it’s hard not to believe that we’re truly blessed.  

As with all new epidemics, we’re really excited about our new products. 

As with all new epidemics, we’re really excited about our new products.

I’m happy to say that, with the patent now securely in place, we look forward to the happy global proliferation of HEP C.

Unfortunately, as was not the case with HIV, we have a timeline on this one. I know - you can’t have everything! HIV was fantastic for us because nobody could see an eventual control or cure, and of course, when something heaven-sent like HIV happens, its time to install that new pool and grab a new car in anticipation of a LONG pay day. HIV was the ‘gift’ that just kept giving - you can imagine our office parties when those new figures were announced... but as we all know, good times don’t last forever.

OK, let’s not delay you any longer - here’s the deal.

What we’re offering is only a one-off deal. Yes, I know you only need to take the medicine once to clear HEP C, but our marketers tell us that you guys LOVE an offer in the middle of the recession! On top of that - this just gets better and better - we’ll give it to you at a cut price if you get tested NOW and order the medicine within the next month!

If not completely satisfied with our product, we will refund ALL yes ALL of your money, no questions asked. For a one-off payment of $49,990 we will deliver you from the evils of HEP C forever. Now isn’t that a small price to pay to keep fucking? We’re giving you a full $10 cash-back incentive on the price we’re charging per-person for the cure! Now who says we’re not fair!

As always there are drawbacks, at this point it’s only going to be rich white people who can access this medicine – I mean, we are a business after all – do the math! But there’s no need to despair - by the time the rest of our ever-growing HEP C community gets around to financing, after all of those nasty side-effects seep in over time -we’ll be doing the unimaginable. You ready? We’re step-financing ALL, yes ALL, of the medications needed for those long term side effects as HEP C develops. Now come on, you can’t get fairer than that! In other words, we’ll help you pay for the worsening illness until you can afford the cure! Christ, it’s no wonder we feel like god sometimes…

As a caring pharmaceutical company we believe strongly in assisting the poorest diasporas struggle through this awful, dreadful disease. And we don’t dangle carrots either– the cure is available to EVERYONE. Come on - you can’t say fairer than that!

Our success is based on our ongoing and passionate conversation with god. Why we have been chosen to be the earthly representatives of the sick and the lame we have no idea, but we feel truly privileged that we are. We know it’s a question that Jesus himself asked his own father on top of that chilly mountain. We can only thank goodness that we don’t have to die in order for everyone else to live in these times - we can take installments instead! How could we ever live with ourselves and call us a human interest corporation, otherwise!

When that dreadful Judas told Jesus to pull in the purse-strings and give to the poor, Jesus let him know the deal. ‘There will be poor always. Always struggling, ’ he said.

Well guess what? We are going to help the struggling poor with what we call, ‘The One Payment Step Closer to Thee’ plan. Thee, in this case is that all-important cure at the end of all your suffering. Next we’ll be raising the dead!

And because we operate from our own campus, it means that all you lepers will remain outside!

Just one trip to your GP or medical centre organizes all!

Now, you can’t say fairer than that!

Sochi Homo. Bauer. GScene Magazine. March 2014.

This statement was forwarded to be read out at the opening of the Winter Olympics at Sochi, 2014.

 Sochi Homo

Ask yourself - what really holds Queer culture back?

We do. We do because of our continuing lack of acceptance of the ‘normal’.

We just don’t trust the ‘normal’. More importantly, we may have nothing in our pockets, but we will never allow ourselves, at any point, to be just ‘normal’.

Equality is not sought by us, nor is it an end result. So, no gifts please - we want no acceptance - because it now seems that we’ve been right all along. What we are transcends the thousand barriers of race and class and gender because we're everywhere and always will be. And we haven’t worried ourselves to traverse those difficult situations, we’ve ran at them screaming. We’re the ones who have chosen to walk alone down those dark alleyways. And we’ve been granted no permission whenever it’s been sought.

We’ve come through reams of litigation and condemnation and will again and again and again. And we will still laugh in the face of any contrition, because we can’t promise not to do any of it again - to any of your judges – in fact, we will do it again, but next time it will be bigger and louder than the night sky in a hurricane.

And we’ll rise and fall and not worry because of the stars that surround us, our chosen families that flicker away and die all too soon. We refuse to count our blessings, be contrite and play tic-tac-toe on the steps of your churches. Or to be ‘strong’ again, when you’ve already decided not to listen.

“What we are, transcends the thousand barriers of race and class and gender because we’re everywhere and always will be…”

So, we don’t accept your acceptance, nor do we seek the breadth or creed of your forgiveness. Because we do not need forgiveness from anyone. That has to come from you, for yourselves. That has to come from the conscience of those who’ve beaten, ridiculed and chided us for thousands of years. Those who’ve denied us our real, dear families, those who’ve hijacked our deaths and begrudgingly complied with the normalcy of our new weddings. Ask yourselves; is this forgiveness? Should we lean on your one heart with the weight of millions who came before us and who stand alongside us right now?

I bring my pain with me to the table, a pain so great and long-lived that it still stirs the soul and the belly of my being. I bring on the faces of the young dead from my own past, the real warriors of a filthy bloody war we all went through together. And the women, who ran to the aid of their broken brothers and created a single voice that’s still screaming out today.

So, go with all your fabulous sins, my brothers and sisters, and real joy will be sure to follow you. I love those who run to that slippery edge in a game of kiss, dare and death. I love those who subvert the very sex that’s supposed to define them. I love those who love me back simply because of love itself and I love those who keep loving, when loving has long passed.

And those who know where normality ends and reality begins. The kids who put whatever they have into in a flimsy sack and find a way to leave their early families behind. And to falter over and over again and never stop faltering until they die, because those are the follies that make us. The mettle that binds us in every sea of no fucking hope. The glue that never separates us from the reality of our life and death experience. The fear that sometimes keeps us separate from each other, yet brings us together when the knives go down. The strength to draw from all history because we know that all history is really ours; that we’ve peppered the changes on those dull old maps and coloured the weave of every creative stroke. These changes made, because not to reminds us only of regret - that building stone of our lives that we’re never allowed to shed.

The pathways to our worlds remain open but shackled. The roads are still wide but populated less. But we have shown over and over the power of our steps and grown steadily - supported only by the very best. Can we really give away this life of ours - a history so rich within us all? Can we not falter and have to watch our backs at every life event, lest it be normalized and given the so-called protection of a society that has proved itself so wrong?

To sacrifice our otherness is to walk with passing strangers, to lose the trust we’ve known to share. Because that otherness is our only identity. It’s that one within a crowd that refuses to be accompanied, or the voice that will be heard - but only by a few. Will they kill it off with persecution again? Will they succeed in changing us into what they really think we are? Will they keep trying when they have failed so many, many times before?

It’s time to stop history, dead. What’s happened up until now happens no more. The door has been closed for the very last time. So, don’t rejoice or ‘permit’ us - we reject all of that. Instead, look to yourselves and in there, see who we are. Then, look out to the world and see who has made it glow for you.

Go on, we dare you - look out into the world.

The Death Issue. Gscene Magazine. Charlie Bauer Phd. February 2014

The Death Issue


"With my tears go into your loneliness, my brother. I love him who wants to create over and beyond himself, and thus perishes.” Thus spoke Zarathustra.

I’ve observed lots of queer happenings from various parts of the planet over the last two years. After I was drugged and shipped to New Zealand by my academic peers, I worked my way steadily towards the West Coast of North Americashire with the wildly changing queer landscape trailblazing behind me. I crossed oceans of rednecks and mountains of sliding prejudice and tried to document what I saw along the way. Even when I was in physical danger I never stopped once to think about the miracle that is supposedly my ‘life’.

I can see the middle-age mountain ahead. The one that queers of my age were not really supposed to - we weren’t actually supposed to survive. And it wasn’t just the AIDS crisis that flawed our confidence, it happened way before that. We never partied like it was never gonna end, we knew more than anyone that it was. In return it gave us a feeling of invincibility – at nineteen, with a head full of drugs, I danced on the slutbox at Heaven because I knew that I was going to die.

I never wanted a career and a pension back then and still don’t now. And I’ve no issues about my big exit because I’m a God-hater. However, I do think it’s sensible to make living wills and arrangements for our own deaths and here is why. I, we, have managed to push though so much crap and get to the point we are now by stealth, and we have remained in control of our own keeling boats for so long against the unnecessary tsunamis of heteroland that, if I snuff it tomorrow, I still need to have some element of control at the back-end.

“As a queer, I’ve been a coffin dodger since the age of seventeen, so death holds no power for me”

The other day, I thought back to when AIDS funerals were as popular as cable re-runs of Strictly. I remembered those final send offs hijacked by christian families reclaiming, so they thought, the darkened soul of the one lead astray by evil forces of homosexuality. That was, just before God absolved them of the sins we always called ‘virtues’. Those families who could never grasp why we saddos preferred to live in dumps like Hackney, Streatham, The Castro or Silver Lake rather than on the industrial outskirts of the towns where we were born and took it daily on the chin. Maybe, we were too busy running for the Nietzschean edge of the abyss quoted above, by creating ‘above ourselves’ and perishing, joyously, as a result.

At the AIDS funerals, I remember all those mohawks flattened by discreet hats, pierce holes freshly visible in noses, ears and cheeks - so as not to offend the family who took up the first two rows. The people who had little interest in the body before them but now, in a collective grief, could claim him as their own and sanitise away anything other than a perceived identity or history. This would be the first time those angry, now bereft, brothers would be shamed into crying. Later, as a result of their uncontrollable emotion they’d waltz in and take the houses, let the dogs free in a local park, sell the collateral and demonise the living partner for passing on such a heinous disease to their dear brother. All permissible by law.

There are still no words for the expressions on those families’ faces when in excess of a thousand mourning queers turned up and spilled out into the streets. There’s nothing as powerful as the emotional corrective of an extended family of queers to bring the matter home. 

“Who knew he was so... popular...”

There’s nothing quite like a full on Catholic burial, replete with liturgies about what ‘clean decent people’ the deceased were when the audience is comprised mainly of leather and piss club collectives and circuit party-ers. I’d want my own liturgy to mention those 15 gorgeous men I spent one single night with in a sauna, who meant more to me and my memory than every school friend I ever had. I want the parts of my life and the stuff I felt as ‘normal’ to be valued. And if you don’t want to hear it, then don’t bother going...
As a queer, I’ve been a coffin dodger since the age of seventeen, so death holds no power for me. There have been no days in my adult life when I have not been confronted with death, even if I haven’t recognised it. And for the people out there who may patronise us about how wonderful life is and how we must cherish all of it at all times, that if we don’t we must be somehow ‘depressed’ - here, take this pill...

I’m not depressed. I’m a realist and I’ve lived long enough to see both sides of the dying crap and it has zilch power. God forbid in a Christian way, our death is hijacked by the very people who caused it. But that doesn’t really matter - because we’ll be dead. However, and this isn’t narcissism, I don’t want that last image of myself to be one surrounded by sacred hearts and flowers or Virgin Marys in a chapel of rust. Throw me at the side of the road, chuck me in the Manchester ship canal. This isn’t me being disrespectful to my loved ones, it’s just me not sanctioning some weird process designed for the arrogance of the living. And I will not be packaged up in normativity when I am too incapacitated (okay - dead) to do anything about it. 


Click here for published version of this article

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