A goodnight story for humanity. Gscene Magazine, August 2014. Charlie Bauer Phd

A Goodnight Story for Humanity

Long ago, in a land far away there was a young prince (James Murdoch) who was soon to be given his old fathers kingdom. But first there was a task he needed to do to prove himself worthy. He had to take a journey to a far away land and bring back the world’s biggest diamond (BBC) for the kings treasure chest. This huge diamond had been protected fiercely by the people of the land. They all knew - because of an old spell - that if it were ever taken away, they would all lose their voices and never be able to speak to one another again. 

So, the prince decided that he would go to the country peacefully and try to convince the people (MacTaggart lecture, 2009) that the diamond was too big and that they’d all be better off without it. The people, who believed anything a prince would ever tell them, thought long and hard. Maybe he had a point. They were, after all, paying taxes to keep the diamond in its glass case on a hill by the ocean. And even if they wanted to see it, it would cost them more than 2 shillings (License fee). But the prince deceived the people because he knew that once the king had the diamond he then owned all of the diamonds in the world. 

However, in the woods lived a bunch of merry men (The Guardian) who could see the prince’s cunning plan. They decided to let the people know that the prince was evil and that his father’s court did very bad things to poor people’s children (Milly Dowler’s voice mail). If there was anything the people didn’t like, it was if someone stole their secrets or if children were harmed in any way. Even local gossip could drive the people to seek revenge on innocent people (NOTW name and shame campaign: 2000). 

The merry men told the people that the king had a wizard (Andy Coulson) who could magically capture the people’s secrets (phone hacking) and when they were told this they turned their backs on the King and wouldn’t let him near their diamond. They captured the king’s princess (Rebekah Brooks) and threatened to banish all of his friends from the land. 

Defeated, the prince returned to his father’s kingdom. The king was very angry because the prince had not only failed in all his efforts to capture the diamond but he also had the princess thrown into jail. The prince was shamed and went to the dungeon to seek solace with his dukes. He would never get his fathers crown and felt he was a bad prince.
Later, around the campfire, one of the dukes said he remembered that there was someone who guarded the diamond who hated children (Jimmy Saville). Maybe if they could tell the people, they wouldn’t like the diamond anymore. 

The prince laughed heartily, for he knew that this news would greatly please the king. So, from his castle far away, (Australia) the prince began to gather all of the dukes information together and let all the people know about the evil guard. As he did this, other people told him there were even more guards who hated children. And because the prince was very rich (because he was, after all, a prince) he bought up all the secrets in the land. Eventually, the prince convinced the king that the princess would never be free unless he himself went to save her. The King agreed, finally glad that his son was in command of his own fortitude. 

Eventually, one by one, all of the guards of the diamond were unveiled as children haters - the thing that the people would never forgive. So, as the prince had prophesized, the people began to hate their diamond and even though it was not the diamonds fault because diamonds cannot talk - they turned their backs on it. 

On the day that the princess was going to be put to death by a poisonous snake, the prince rode into town with his dukes. He gave the judge a beautiful new robe and told both him and the poor people who would decide the princess’s fate, that the real enemy was the diamond. Then he gave them all the parchments that his dukes had given him and they were finally convinced.

When the princess’s life was spared, the prince sent word to his father that he had conquered the diamond, saved the princess and killed the guards all in one day.
And the people rejoiced because all the evil guards had gone and all of the children could finally live in peace again.
And the merry men, defeated, went back into the woods in shame because they’d been let down by the people they’d only wanted to help. They knew that if only they could afford to buy the judge a new robe they would never have been beaten by the prince. 

And, for the first time in a hundred and one years, the diamond grew dim and the king let it roll into the ocean.
‘But father, I thought the diamond was everything you’ve ever wanted?’ The Prince said.
‘No. That diamond was worthless to me all along,’ the king replied, ‘I can die happy now that you have learnt the value of things, my son - for that was your quest’. And the prince knelt and the king placed his crown (News International) onto his head. 

It came to pass that the king never wanted the diamond for his treasure chest after all; he just wanted all the people to follow him. And even though the people lost their voices and were unable to speak to one another again, they all lived happily ever after. 

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KPFK. Hollywood. 2014

Homonormativity is a virus. Bauer. Gscene Magazine. July 2014

Homonormativity is a virus     July 2014       GScene Magazine

 Hang on, what’s all this about using wet wipes on homos? Agh. According to research somewhere in Eastern England last month (or the month before, sometime), the heterosexually defined needed to cleanse themselves when they were in any contact with a homosexual. Why didn’t I think of that? Because, maybe we are of the same filth.

Let me explain, firstly, I’m not at all knowledgeable in any of this. I lied myself though one degree and bought my PhD online from the University of Throckmorton, Texas (best $300 I’ve ever spent). What I can gather in between bumps of K, is that a few spotty straight identifying teenagers were asked for their reactions if they had to borrow a phone from a gay man and they said they’d rather wipe their arse with it. And? Then some Spanish students were asked would they rather accept a pencil or a Wetwipe in the same circumstances. They chose to wipe.

I still have a problem with, for example, Latin cultures and the proliferation of anti-gay sentiment through the Christian scriptures handed down by closeted priests to underpaid and overworked parents. My parents were almost the same but northern white-trash Catholics. I’m sure, like my parents, they thanked god daily that both school and the church (which were comingled) existed so that they could get the kids off their hands and earn some money to feed the little sods. They had no thoughts about social complexities and homophobia, they assumed that their kids were straight because they themselves had never met anyone gay.

Then some Polish students were offered the same test and, front to back, wiped away. Ditto the above but now with the political ataxia of communism thrown in. Yet another ‘Homophobic’ doctrine tossed at parents who have missed the modernist boat of social reform. Probably this is why their children are choosing a British education in the first place.

"Metastasizing through the rhetoric of their leaders into the ears of children"

It seems pretty inconclusive on a conscious level; the parent cultures embedded identities in political doctrine and the church - despite any heteronormatvity or homophobia thrown in - have influenced their own children’s fear of the queer. Nothing else. Metastasizing through the rhetoric of their leaders into the ears of children.

As a sometimes fellator, sometimes drug-fuelled top, sometimes prizewinner in local Macramé contests, I will not take any of this seriously. After all, I’m sure most of these badly-formed students who are rich enough to leave their motherland for a cheap English education, are in for a rude awakening. Losing that deep entrenched primitivism is bloody hard work. I know it; I come from a good, solid British working-class culture whose parents never read a book and a place where a hippie told me not to say the ‘N’ word when I was fifteen.

When it comes to issues of contracting HIV from phones and toilet seats, actions speak louder than words. I’ve snogged all of my positive friends, even when HIV didn’t have a name. And let’s face it Diana kissing the AIDS patient did more for the love and care of the ‘soon to be dead’ than any of Thatcher and Saatchi’s AIDS campaigns ever did. Any studies around this are moot. In the so-called, most 'primitive' societies of central Africa with all the western strangulation of expensive medication, they have no choice but to use the same equipment as the dying. These messages are still sent through idiot parents, cultures, religions and political doctrines, where the homophobic slurry still seeps.

I think the most fascinating theory, the reference for which I’ve got written on a Post-it near the cat tray and can’t be arsed to get at this point, is that gay men collectively think we’re all a bit 'ikky'. Gay men will always think that, we love it. The one remaining right we have is that we can be judgmental and laugh it off. I know groups of gay men who pay handsomely for some of the ’filth’ that we are supposed to do to each other. No social meaning involved. And some of them don’t even wash their hands afterwards before calling for pizza.

As Bifuria D’sconza recently said, “When everyone realised it’s white, straight men that have screwed up the planet; everyone else - faggots and clown faces too - grouped together to knock those assholes down. Sista - Homosexuals ain’t the problem. White, male, bankers are. And the governments that feed them too. I thought everyone knew that. Where you been livin?”

Some friends of mine just love waking up in their own vomit after being dragged, face down out of Legends at 3 AM.  They go back again and again and who can deny, what is to them, such an important part of their identity. How many times have I ended up in a piss club and sobered up with the texts from friends the next day calling me all the dirty scrubbers under the sun? How many times have I just laughed at such filth and got on with my daily, unconscious homo existence. We don’t scorn ‘filth’, we accept it. Because, as Lola once said, ‘that’s just how we are’.

Filth, like homosexuality, is not a mutable platform for the degenerates and there is no way we can bend – whether the Nazis are pounding at the door or not. To suggest that we can change decries the fact that all those queers killed in the Holocaust had some form of choice in the matter to 'man up.'

Here we have spelled out what homophobia isn’t. It’s not about gender policing or anything else. It’s about getting rid of essentialism within political doctrines and religions spewed from the primitive masses and the conservative men (hang on, they’re the bankers aren’t they?) and replacing it with homonormativity, its’ sworn sister.

Twitter: @charliebauerphd

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The Tranny Pack. Gscene Magazine. June 2014

The Tranny Pack. Charlie Bauer PhD. Gscene Magazine. June 2014 

Fever rages in the US about Trans terminology on RuPaul's TV show, 'Drag Race.' Again, and I bleat on about this ad infinitum - it all comes down to the language. I mean to say - even the title is a direct association with macho culture. Now there's subversion at work.  

I say again, I can chose to say that I’m a dirty, stinkin,’ rotten, filthy homo (because I am). Jaysus - even my friends call me this. But if someone else called me it in the street? Hmmm. Well, I’ve realised by now that they only want a reaction from me, so I just shove my pudenda high and head off along my way. But sometimes it’s different. In that scream across the street, there’s usually a morsel of hatred. If you respond, then you open up the (usually violent) conversation that ensues. If you’re alone, vulnerable and/or off your face, it can get very nasty, very quickly.

Before the big homogenization of the LGBTQI… culture that happened as result of HIV and AIDS - in my hometown, at least, it was common for women to be referred to by gay men as ‘Fish’. I’m not getting into any prosaic reasons why this could be, other than to say it was yet another barrier in the breaking down the terminology of the closet.

And we’ve always reclaimed words, the fact that RuPaul chooses to do that in mainstream media is a debate within itself. The fact that a Black Trans person is up there and accepted within mainstream cultural media, surely goes somewhere to answering the visibility question. Misogyny towards Trans women exists and is still very real, but this is not that, so put down that claw-hammer for lord’s sake.

As you know, again old-fashioned of me, but I’m a big fan of contextualization. And Vaudeville. And RuPaul is modern Vaudeville. She’s that wonderful intertext between the mainstream and the street. That humor that surrounds us and is aimed back at ourselves, is only received from a point of privileged power. As a matter of note, take a look at the way Jewish humor works - the most sophisticated humor on the planet, yet never taken literally. Even an old goy like myself is in on those jokes. Whoops – I’ve mentioned it – humor – that dirty word, again.

RuPaul has only ever exploited RuPaul. RuPaul has not changed gender as she has become famous to gain a wider audience. RuPaul still isn’t compromising. The battles for Trans people to be here are hard fought and hard won and RuPaul had that same fight. A fight that was started when the, then lowest common denominators, - the drag queens and the whores - pushed back on June 29^th 1969 at The Stonewall Inn.

Granted, nothing has been helped by the freak show/drag show of daytime television but the community has not been put back by the mention of the word Tranny and She-male on American Telly, sorry, television. Granted, this terminology was generated within the heterosphere, but it has also been used as an internal tool by the ideological separatists in the name of everyone else within the acronym. No-doubt the same separatists that won’t consider self-identifications such as ‘Drag Queen’ or ‘Cross Dresser’ to be included within the Trans umbrella. But this rigidity about who is Trans and who is not fails everyone - Trans being a point of movement and not necessarily a final destination.

So, just to get this straight, lots of people are included within the capital T of the acronym. Gender bender/drag/occasional cross dresser. Straight boys who dress as women, aren’t ridiculing, subverting or kidding anyone, neither are they being disrespectful to the Trans (or female) community. And I’m sure what begins as fun soon changes into something altogether more liberating for some of these men. Anyone who expresses gender differences and fluidity are surely welcome here. Anyone, for whatever reasons and for whatever period of time. Sorry to all concerned but the closet is open for business.

In May 2012 I wrote an article about my meeting with Trans man in Invercargill on the southernmost tip of New Zealand. His partner was in the northern Island but he chose to stay in the frozen south. He told me about the Whakawahine (3^rd gender) within the Māori and Samoan cultures. Cultures who both respect and honor the Trans people within their communities where they stand alongside warriors.  In the west, the war paint is somewhat different.

I also remember an episode that took place in South Wales in the early hours of October 3^rd, 2009. Drunken Dean Gardener and Jason Fender taunted a pair of cross-dressed men who were walking along the street in wigs, short skirts and high heels. When bare-chested Gardener threw a punch, one of the men landed two lightning quick blows, rendering Gardener and Fender unconscious in under 30 seconds. The cross-dressers regained their composure, linked arms and wandered off again into the night.

The police were eventually called and all concerned were, of course, arrested including the cross-dressing cage fighters the straight boys chose to pick on that night.

The verdict? Gardner and Fender were tagged and given community orders as a result of their Trans-phobic aggression, while the cage fighters walked free. And nobody mentioned the fact they were dressed as, or identified themselves as women.

www.soundcloud.com/thewholeworld

Interview with Don Bachardy. Charlie Bauer PhD talks about love, Isherwood, praise of older men and love letters

The public cost of private health care. Gscene Magazine. May 2014

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!