The surprise passing of Stephen Gately forces us to reconsider questions of life and mortality
– and to wonder if there ever really is such a thing as fate.
When a woman is successful on the running track, why is it that our first response is often to question their gender? And if the line between male and female is sometimes blurred, is it really that big of a deal?
For decades Irish authority figures prattled on about family values, while in real life our attitudes to children were Victorian compared to Mediterranean cultures. It’s time the State enshrined their welfare in our constitution.
To get ahead in Irish society, a dubious attitude towards the truth has always helped. But as chickens come home to roost it is, at long last perhaps, time for change
Better to say your piece and suffer the consequences than remain one of the fearful silent – as your correspondent discovered when he weighed in on the Cathal Ó Searcaigh scandal.
At a time of economic upheaval, people are turning their backs on traditional ways of doing business and embracing different economic models – even the ancient art of barter is making a comeback.
The US is toasting the election of its first African-American Commander in Chief. But can an Irish politician unite the country in a similar fashion as financial meltdown looms?
Whether it’s reality schlock, hard news or sports, television holds a mirror up to society – and tells us truths about ourselves we may not always be comfortable confronting.
Maybe the downturn will force us to step back and recognise what has gone wrong. First up: help the unhappy young men, the main problem in Irish society.
Why do so many gay men find it difficult to honestly express their feelings towards their partners? And would the introduction of gay marriage really change anything?
In our increasingly matriarchal society, the male sex drive has become increasingly taboo. That is at least a factor in the demonisation of the leading Irish poet, in a controversial new documentary.
The suicide of a popular, pretty academically distinguished 15-year old-girl forces all of us to examine our own private desires for self obliteration.
So long as our in-built tendency towards irrationality and superstition is balanced with a commitment to scientific truth, this predisposition can prove invaluable as we strive to make sense of the world.
The media targeting of gay websites, following revelations that a 14-year-old boy had sex with men, is unhelpful, unjustified and contributes to an inaccurate picture of paedophiles ‘grooming’ young men for sex.
The mythology surrounding emigration may have become an Irish cliche, but there's no denying the pain of forced separation. Coming to terms with a changed socety is challenging for those making the return journey.
Our culture still hasn’t figured out how to deal with mortality, and experiments with a bewildering range of panaceas. But an encounter with death can be invigorating.
In 1988, HP journalist Joe Jackson interviewed the then Lord Mayor, Ben Briscoe. His homophobic opinions in the resulting article in Hot Press sparked an argument in the letters section of the Irish Times, to which Dermod Moore, then unaffiliated with Hot Press, contributed his thoughts. Here's the letter in full.
The church's obstinate refusal to adopt a progressive stance on social issues means it continues to alienate a significant section of society – even at Christmas.
Returning to London from a trip to Tuscany, Bootboy re-evaluates his love for urban anonymity, and discovers why there’s no room for big fish in the small ponds.
From Bill Clinton’s infidelity to his country’s version of foreign policy, the concept of “moral indefensibility” makes a twisted kind of sense in the United States
I bought a pair of classic Levi’s 501 jeans today. I had to search for them, they’re not easy to find these days. I eventually found a dedicated Levi’s shop that had them in stock, in the back, behind sliding panels.
I bought a pair of classic Levi’s 501 jeans today. I had to search for them, they’re not easy to find these days. I eventually found a dedicated Levi’s shop that had them in stock, in the back, behind sliding panels.
Though the tendency of western governments towards corruption and warmongering can induce despair in even the most optimistic of people, it is important to remember that change can be achieved – albeit incrementally.
Whilst the media are content to ignore the moral ambiguities we encounter in the everyday world, in real life objective truth is a good deal more difficult to establish.
Reading a controversial article on “bug chasing” – gay men who deliberately have bareback sex with HIV positive men – inspired our columnist to go public for the first time about a traumatic episode in his own love life.
After being viciously attacked by a gang of thugs in our "fair" city, Bootboy wonders what is wrong with a society that engenders such senseless, animalistic aggression
Sex terrorist and cultural magus Mark Simpson dives lad-first into the world of sex through a lends in his uncompromisingly candid new collection of essays, sex terror - erotic misadventures in pop culture
I didn't want to write this one. The one where I say that I've just finished a three-month relationship and it hurts too much to cry and I don't understand myself or men any more.
My mother says that she didn t hear a bang. It was a couple of whooshes, she says. I was chatting to her on my mobile. What was that? she asked. I told her it was a bomb, I had just watched a bomb go off across the road from me, and I had to go.
Dating is an activity I’m trying to get the hang of recently. It requires a little confidence, and probably a good dose of maturity. Which is probably why I haven’t done much of it before.
Semiotics: a branch of linguistics concerned with signs and symbols - Oxford Concise Dictionary
"Sex is largely a matter of semiotics, a language of signs which the body learns, the artful projection of an artful self.
The Americans have been listening, with their redundant anti-Soviet submarine technology, in the waters now known as the Malin Sea. They've heard whalesong, which is not unusual; but for the first time in decades they've recognised the song from the Mother of them all, the Blue Whale. In the past couple of years, according to a report in the Independent, five of these animals, the biggest ever to inhabit the Earth, have been seen in this part of the world.
Confidence, n. firm trust; assured expectation; self-reliance; boldness, impudence, telling of private matters with mutual trust. [f. L CON (fidere trust, faith)
There s a school of thought that says it s not the damage that s done when a child is hurt that causes problems later in life; it s the failure to repair it. Mistakes are made by parents all the time; after all, they are only human.
Fabulous, a. celebrated in fable; unhistorical, legendary, incredible, absurd, exaggerated; (colloq.)
marvellous, from fable, a story not founded on fact.
- Concise Oxford Dictionary
Frankly Mr Shankly
This position I hold
It pays my way
And it corrodes my soul
I want to leave
You will not miss me
I want to go down in musical history
- The Smiths
I forgive Esther Rantzen for That s Life. Not many people can reach into their souls and find such forgiveness possible, but for me it s suddenly been made easy. She s produced an excellent documentary series on BBC1, Prostitute.
If I m ashamed of finding a man beautiful, and I keep it secret, then what good is that? Why do I go to great lengths to prevent
heterosexual men from finding
out that I find them attractive?
My little sister s getting married. Date not set yet (i.e. she s not pregnant). That hasn t stopped our dearly beloved radical if-a-priest-comes-near-my-coffin-I ll-spit-at-him mother from going wholeheartedly potty with plans to redecorate the entire house in gleeful anticipation of the expected and expectant hordes.
Portia, my six-month old female kitten, had her tubes tied yesterday. Bringing her to the vet in the morning was heart-breaking. She kept on sticking her paw out of the cage to touch me for reassurance while we were in the taxi, expressing such misguided trust in me that I felt like a monster. I was apprehensive because her mother had died under anaesthetic, and I had grave suspicions that such things were hereditary. But in the evening I collected her, and she had survived.
Seven years ago, I sat with a dear friend of mine in a coffee bar one Saturday morning and we read the Irish Times. The night before, Ireland had elected Mary Robinson. It was an Irish revolution.
I do not know now whether Dublin rent-boys now have anything like the same culture or cohesiveness. Perhaps they have faded away, having been replaced in the 90s by ice-cool bodybuilders who take credit cards over the phone.
Here's a "conversation" I had recently on the Internet, with someone I hadn't met before. We met in the "gay skinheads" group. It speaks for itself, really. Thanks William.
Pornography, n, explicit description or exhibition of sexual activity in literature, films, etc., intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings; literature containing this.
Oxford English Dictionary
Please, take pity on me and shoot me now. I ve just discovered the IRC. Like going from soft drugs to the hard stuff, I ve just had my first taste of the most addictive time-consuming pastime that could possibly have been invented to tempt me to hell and eternal damnation.
For a month there, I thought I had something good going with someone; until he finished it last week. It was strange revisiting the pleasures of coupledom; it had been two years since my last relationship ground to a shuddering, gory halt. This time around, it has a no-blame feel to the ending
I had a very interesting conversation today with a man called Adam Crosier, who is author of a new report from the British Health Education Authority called Life On The Scene . It s a survey of sexual practices among gay men on the scene, interviewed in bars and clubs over ten years from 1986 1996. It s emphatically not a survey of gay men in general.
Sometimes symbols are powerful and universal; they carry an archetypal, numinous force. Sometimes symbols are subtle; only those trained psychoanalytically or esoterically can help you come to some understanding of what they mean to you.
Bootboy's productivity takes off ... he credits sexual energy as the driving force, and ponders the impact of such vigour on those who are expected to remain celibate.
I am going to share a really intimate piece of information about my bodily functions. I am cursed with narrow Eustachian tubes. Eustachian tubes, for the uninitiated, are tiny pressure-release tubes that go from somewhere in your nasal cavity to the inside of your ear.
Yesterday I went to listen to a Franciscan friar, a psychoanalyst, talk about his work with people with HIV and AIDS. He spoke eloquently and movingly about the many difficult journeys he has witnessed and followed. He spoke of gay men coming to terms with their own premature death, and of their search for their life’s meaning in the face of such bleak horror.
TRAPPED IN a slow motion nightmare, I listen transfixed to the daily reports from a courtroom in Preston in Lancashire. Each day, a few more minutes are added to our knowledge of the last hours of Jamie Bolger's life, the five-year-old who was abducted and killed by boys who are still children themselves.
The conclusive outing of Sir Roger Casement, National Hero, on Róisín McCauley's groundbreaking (if not a little coy) Radio 4 documentary programme recently, nearly eighty years after his execution for treason in the cause of Irish Freedom, is in pleasant synchronicity with the changes that are happening this year with regard to Irish legal acceptance of sexual difference.
ADMIRING THE beautiful shorn features of Matthew Devereux on the cover of the last issue, mischievous, curiously boyish and teasing, I would like to know whether the skinhead image appeals erotically to women as much as it does to me.
