Tickle the Future

"To be a queen became for them an honourable title, a badge to be worn with inverse pride. When he first began there was no Mardi Gras, no gay pride, no Oxford Street. There weren't gay saunas or bookshops or coffee houses, newspapers or magazines. Instead he entered a wonderful, subterranean world, where a drag queen trailed a finger across his cheek and told him how beautiful he would look in a dress, a world where he was instantly popular, a million miles from the soulless suburb where he grew up.

"It didn't take long for the poison to arrive. Through the dream, the discovery which went on for years, person after person flung themselves at him, declaring undying love. Their deaths or their threatened suicides became the ultimate emotional blackmail. Yet another he had spurned died the day after, drinking a bottle of scotch before noon and collapsing right in the middle of Sydney's most famous gay bar.

"For months afterwards the boy's friends screamed at him out of car windows, blaming him. It was easy to believe that he was inherently evil, that to love him was to court disaster."

THE BIGGER STORY

Hicks likely to touch down today
Frank WalkerMay 20, 2007 SMH
DAVID Hicks is expected to arrive back in Australia today, after spending more than five years in a high security US military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
A thick veil of secrecy has been thrown over the operation to fly Hicks home from Cuba to Adelaide, but sources said his military plane was due to land in Tahiti late last night to refuel.
The US military plane carrying Hicks, 31, his Adelaide lawyer David McLeod, two senior South Australian prison guards and military personnel is expected to land at the Edinburgh RAAF base near Adelaide this morning.
Hicks, who pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorism under a deal that allowed him to serve out a nine-month jail term in Australia, will be taken in a prison van from the base to the high-security Yatala Labour Prison a few kilometres away.