Holding on tight

C’mon, girls, do you believe in love?

‘Cause I got something to say about it. And it goes something like this -¦

I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately, particularly after loving the gay-love play Holding The Man. This polished production deserves every accolade and full house it gets. It is a brilliant theatrical realisation of a brilliant book. Watching the sad, funny story of the young lovers Tim and John, I laughed and I cried, and the next day I had vague, fancy ideas of sending a big bunch of flowers to the cast.

The AIDS stuff in the play is as powerful as any reader of this paper would expect, but what is somewhat surprising is that the love stuff is even more powerful. It was the same with the book, and I say this is surprising because we so rarely talk about men being in love with one another. Men desiring one another, we talk about all the time; men porking each other, well, we never shut up about it, do we?

But re men loving each other; we don’t hear a lot about it.

For example, have you ever heard gay men talk about making love? Not often, I’ll bet. We talk candidly about fucking, or mansex, or even (for clinical purposes) anal intercourse with casual and/or regular partners, but we don’t often talk about making love with our lovers.

This crazy little word, love, also seems to have disappeared from the language we use in our campaigns for gay and lesbian rights. It’s there in the background, but kind of mute, pushed out of vogue by talk about rights, and that bland catch-all phrase, relationship recognition.

I guess that’s, you know, completely fine and all, but it seems to me that when the media only ever equate gay sex with disease, or drugs, or things that go on in the public toilet at Myer, there’s value in reminding people that gay sex often takes place in the context of gay love as well. Hell, it’s worth reminding ourselves of that fact too.

That’s just one of the things that this production of Holding The Man does. Make sure you don’t miss this production. See it with someone you love.