Sydney big Heat

It is the middle of the Big Heat Wave and I have to go to Sydney. Well I could avoid it, but why stay at home just sitting in front of the air-con? Last night The Laramie Project was a success. It was difficult to swallow, as expected, but Jessica the director did a great job with a team of virtually intried amateurs. Her staging was excellent and the audience warmed to the grisly tale of the murder of gay hate in Wyoming in1998. And then there was the installation. Outside under a near full moon, Ian, an artist, had planted dozens of night candles on the ground and constructed a fence-like structure over a grave, on which he had placed a pair (they were my dancing shoes) of black patent leather shoes which were the symbols of the victim Matthew Shephard as he had worn such a pair when cruelly killed on that fateful night. The horrific story was told in a darkened space over nearly three hours. It was long but needed to be so, and the lack of proper air-conditioning in the theatre didn't help too much. But in a way it aided the production as it was already very uncomfortable to hear the details of this atrocious murder by two homophobic young boys who picked up Matthew Shephard in a gay bar in Laramie and took him away to bash him to death, leaving him to die a lingering death hanging on a barbed-wire fence. Both the perpetrators were judged guilty and given life sentences. The world reacted and this play was written to record what can never be forgotten. Discrimination and hate abounds in this world and plays like this need to be seen to remind us to be forever vigilant.

It is on for two more days and I will attend the final q and a on Sunday afternoon on my return from Sydney. It was quite a night at the theatre.

These are the temperatures we are having this weekend....breaking the records.

Cathy Wilcox has done it again.... Our electricity has been privatised and the competion is not for service but for corporate profit.

Anti-Islam Party has a party, what a lot of narrow minded bigots are in politics....

The Vatican is the most guilty of all in this tragic history of child abuse.....it is difficult to see where it will end - the final demise of the Catholic Church, arguably the world's wealthiest organisation? Perhaps not quite yet.

Last night's programme....I even got a small credit there.

Today's modern gay women in sport, out and proud, more than you can say about most of the gay male sportspeople.

Here is the new male fashion statement, not bad at all, but not everyone can pull it off.

A cat film to be seen, about a ginger cat of course, called Bob.

Still another book published about the AIDS phenomenon. I wonder when they will cease being written, not for a while yet I suppose, while some of us are still alive. So many have been written I feel no need to contibute although my story would be unique, as indeed are they all.

I am off to Sydney for a meeting with 'The 78ers' who are  the many gay people who were involved in the first gay demonstration in Sydney in 1978, of which I was one. They are planning the forty year anniversary for next year as each decade passes there will be fewer of us to remember what we had to go through for the eventual personal freedom many assume just happened. It didn't, without a tough and sometimes dirty fight, and that is what we are commemorating. Tomorrow, by contrast, I am participating in a Worship Service for Eckankar. A big weekend to consume and enjoy in record breaking heat. I will survive.