PWA

In nineteen eighty nine I wrote a song called ‘PWA’.

It was in part inspired by American playwright and activist Larry Kramer and his efforts to get the then POTUS George Bush Senior to release plant based drugs without the hold up of trials to people who were dying from HIV and AIDS.

Instead of tackling this problem head on people in power began to talk instead of God’s biblical wrath against homosexuals, and in Britain a series of government TV commercials were produced showing commandment like tablets crashing to the ground in slow motion, espousing safe sex.

Bush memorably referred to ‘the giggle factor’ when he thought about gay men as many lay emaciated at death’s door.

I still don’t get the joke.

Thirty years on we as a species have come a long way, but unfortunately not always in the right direction.

Here in Britain, since adopting and repealing the notorious Clause 28 which made illegal the promotion of homosexuality, we have passed same sex marriage into law whereas in Russia, a short hop away, buggery obsessed men with self-imposed ignorance would have homosexuality made illegal or, as in Iran, punishable by death.

They see a queer conspiracy lead by packs of limp-wristed nancy boys who lurk around school playgrounds luring children into lives of butt-fucked depravity.

Feel sorry for these poor fools, their heads filled with all this hogwash.

Homosexuality equals emasculation, they’ll say.

Oh how could there be anything worse for a man than to be in touch with his emotions?

Men are strong, hit things with hammers, blow stuff up, are kings of the castle, whereas women are chattel, here to give birth to and look after their spawn, while in desperation pop valium washed down with gin in Tupperware cups, having “walked into another door”.

The traditional roles.

How people love to waffle on about tradition.

Men destroy while women cower, that’s tradition.

In Nazi Germany, in living memory, homosexual men were rounded up and murdered, although some high ranking male officers were indeed homosexual themselves.

They hypocritically didn’t see themselves as such, they were ‘real men’ who just happened to like a spot of sword swallowing, taking warm showers, riding the top deck of the bus.

Lesbians were deemed first and foremost asocial as their predilections fostered ideas outside of bondage, but were also slain after men tried and failed to fuck the perversion out of them.

Pink for a boy, black for a girl, triangles that is.

The concentration camp, another Great British invention.

Long before Hitler cottoned on we had them in South Africa during the Boer War.

I was born just 14 years after the end of WW2 and it would be another 8 years before homosexuality in Britain became legal, when we entered the age of enlightenment.

Sadly a leap forward is often followed by a backlash.

HIV and AIDS were like manna from heaven to the unreconstructed bigots amongst us.

At the time of writing ‘PWA’ it was predicted that 5,000,000 Africans would be dead from HIV and AIDS by 1991.

This was roundly ignored.

That figure today is 30,000,000 and rising.

You see so long as it was blacks and gays dying we were fine with it.

It's as much a black disease or gay plague as measles.

There is a hangover from white Christian Missionary in Africa that gives vent to the absurd idea that homosexuality is against God, is not natural, brings nothing but misery and disease, and that sodomy, intrinsically connected in the minds of the vacuous, is the work of the Devil.

With over 400 animal species known to have homosexual behavior, what’s natural?

There is more anal sex amongst heterosexual couples that homosexual.

As for all that religious hokum, there is no God.

We in Britain are responsible for much of the backward thinking in the world as we once spread ignorance and hate throughout the Empire.

Now we know better we must continue to lead by example.

In India they have thrown off those shackles, though their treatment of transgender people leaves much to be desired.

America, land of the free, home of the brave, shelterer of huddled masses, has categorically rejected the stupidity of uptight short sighted pig headed politicians and their wish to drag us all into to the mire.

Stephen Fry’s TV documentary ‘Out There’ recently showed us where we are at globally and where we are in danger of going if we allow the most dim witted control.

The awake and aware people of the world know that sexual orientation is something we are born with, that it is not black or white but a rainbow, a beautiful multicolored rainbow.

Ignorance and fear are inexcusable in this day and age, and the perpetration of those two states of being on mass populations by spiteful God Botherers is abhorrent.

As both the L and the T in LGBT I feel it keenly.

If you think that these issues have nothing to do with you, think again.

Ignore the knocks on doors at your peril as one day the knock will be on yours.

We are your sons and we are your daughters,

All we bring is love, don’t turn your backs on us.

Julia Brightly 

October 22nd, 2013

Link to the song ‘PWA’

http://youtu.be/Rn1R0Oco3kA