THE SSO A-Z GUIDE TO QUEER SYDNEY
R IS FOR
Rabbitohs When the legendary rugby league club from Sydney’s south side got a call from a tabloid journo in the lead-up to this year’s Fair Day, the club had reason to be a bit nervous. For the Rabbitohs were then the first A Grade footy team to go out and openly ask for gay supporters.
The question was, would the papers make it a joke, perhaps blaring the headline Funny Bunnies across the front page? Or would they treat it as a way to have another crack at a team that -“ until this year -“ was copping a regular on-field hiding?
In a positive sign of the times it was treated as it actually was: a savvy, modern club mining an untapped market of potential fans. And why wouldn’t the gays back Souths? They’re on a winning streak, they’re rough and tumble, they’re also local for a lot of us. And they’ve got glamour at the top, with a couple of very rich semi-metrosexuals in the owners’ box. Go, Bunnies!
Righteousness Those paying attention in this modern secular society might rightly guess the right to righteousness is the far Right’s alone. When it comes to religiously motivated indignation, the moderates and gay and lesbian churchgoers calling for tolerance are mice compared to the fire and brimstone cast against their liberal lifestyles.
The barest hint of gay issues in the press brings out the self-declared defenders of moral righteousness with condemnations of such fury and hatred that even the Second Coming itself would hesitate to be seen supporting loving relationships. Then came the marriage debate and all pretence of hate the sin, love the sinner was abandoned.
As one columnist in Wagga Wagga’s Daily Advertiser, Reverend Kevin Webb, recently put it, What’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong! We are systematically dismantling society, trashing our heritage and we taunt God with gay abandon -¦ a flagrant disregard for decency, and a flagrant insult to Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Jews.
It makes love and commitment sound like the new mortal sin for the new millennium. It almost makes it sound sexy. If they keep the vitriol up, before long we’ll be having commitment-themed gay dance parties.
