Rough cover
Christopher Wayne Hudson is so hot right now, it seems.
Who’s he, you ask? He’s the guy who allegedly killed one man and shot two other people in rush-hour Melbourne one morning last month. Shortly thereafter, a shirtless photo of him was slapped on the front cover of TheDaily Telegraph – all stocky muscle, smirking attitude and sexy ink – and hey presto, Gay Australia got itself a new fantasy bad-taste lust object.
Ask around, and you’ll find that Hudson has become a hornbag for the homos.
And that, of course, is bad. It’s bad to eroticise someone who has – allegedly – killed a man; bad to fancy someone who has deprived a family of a father and husband; bad to think sexy thoughts about someone who has caused so much grief to so many people.
Which begs the question: what was a sexy shirtless photo of Hudson doing on the front page of TheDaily Telegraph? Obviously the man was news, but why did we get a Men’s Health-style cover portrait, rather than the standard would-be-murderer mugshot?
The answers to those questions, I suspect, are pretty murky, but semi-clad men seem to be appearing in the news pages of our papers more and more often. Several months ago the Herald offset a feature story on Gordon Wood (Rene Rivkin’s ex-chauffer, who faces criminal charges over the 1995 death of the model Caroline Byrne) with a large shirtless portrait, showing this sporty personal trainer (and now, alleged murderer) in his physical prime.
And last year, the Herald ran a shirtless photo of the former Australian Wheat Board chairman Trevor Flugge on several occasions. This photo couldn’t have been more different from the images of Wood and Hudson – Flugge was presented as a clownish figure with flabby tits, pointing a gun at the camera – but in all three cases, the rationale for publishing these shirtless photos seems to be somewhat ambiguous.
It’s like we as readers are being called upon to judge them – but whether it’s their morals or their muscles that we’re supposed to be judging, I’m really not sure.
PS. Speaking of being judged, it seems I made a mistake in my last column regarding the GLBT Health Alliance – which is, in fact, their name, not just “the Health Alliance”, as I had claimed. My apologies for the error.
