Ten great things about the Noughties

1) Matches

It seemed like everyone was getting hitched in the noughties, usually leading to lovely weekends in the Cotswolds or in one case, Barbados. I do!

2) Hatches

Babies popped out everywhere and the cute little cherubs were given old-fashioned names like Arthur and Lilly. Awww.

3) Launch of the MINI

Rover (RIP) and BMW reinvented the classic Mini, and with its retro styling,  customisation options and go-kart handling, brought the fun back to motoring. I’m on my fourth.

4) The iPod and iPhone

At the start of the noughties we were only just getting over hissy cassettes and were starting to burn CDs. Then Apple came along with the iPod, and your entire record collection could be taken with you at all times. iTunes store was another godsend to people who couldn’t be bothered to go to the shops. iPhone finally made mobile internet a pleasure after years of cack-handed attempts.

5) The PVR

With the rise of DVD, suddenly no-one could be arsed to set their videos anymore. But then came services such as TiVo, Sky+ and V+ and recording your TV shows for later viewing was back in fashion again. iPlayer and Catch-up TV on Virgin Media made staying in the new going out.

6) President Barack Obama

After 8 years of Dubya (enough said), the USA finally elected a president with an actual brain, and one who amazingly, is African-American, 45 years after Martin Luther King’s famous speech.

7) Broadband

Do you remember connecting to the net via your phone line and surfing through text-only sites written in a terrible Comic Sans font, then going for a cup of tea if a picture was included on the site? Now we’re up to 50MB Broadband. Zoom zoom!

8 ) Social Media

In the 90s the internet was a solitary experience and you conversed with your friends over work email accounts. Now you can catch up with old friends without bothering to leave the house, and when you do meet up you have nothing to talk about because “I saw all your news on Facebook”.

9) A Fairer Society

Yes, Blair’s legacy starts with I, ends in Q and has R and A in the middle, and it’s all gone to pot now. But let us not forget the fact that the Labour government has made great strides to make the United Kingdom a fairer and more equal society, especially with regards to new laws to help prevent sex, age, disability and sexual orientation discrimination.

10) Civil Partnership Act

Finally, gays got the chance to get their friends to spend a fortune on wedding list presents for them. Oh and enter into a life-long commitment of course. Which I did. Hooray!

Not very civil

A registrar at Islington town hall (which is where I’m getting hitched this year) is taking Islington council to an industrial tribunal as she does not want to perform civil partnerships as it offends her religious beliefs.

As a registrar, she should know that a civil partnership is a civil ceremony, so religion does not come into it in any shape or form, least of all her religion.

If, as expected, she loses her case, I would rather she didn’t officiate at my ceremony through gritted teeth. She needs to go. Equal opportunities at work is not an optional extra.

Battling with Bridezilla

With over 9 months to go until we get hitched, you’d think I’d be able to put my feet up for oh, about 8 months before actually organising anything.

However, the problem is that you are competing for venues with the capital’s army of Bridezillas (male and female) who book everything up three years in advance.

So with a little cajoling from the Chef, we’ve been getting organised. Sure enough, our first choice registry office was booked up, leaving us with our second choice, Islington Town Hall. This means we may have to transport our guests to our restaurant of choice. It’s all far too complicated!

Thank god that the flowers are being done by my mum and the photos are being done by Tom, my cousin-in-law. Tom’s been busy with more that photography recently, as he’s played a part in increasing our guest list by one.

Then cousin Monica (Tom’s sister-in-law, do keep up!) announced another addition to the list. Congratulations to them, if any other male-female couples are planning unprotected sex please could you give us advance warning?!

We’re off to give notice to our local registrar on Friday so we can confirm the booking with Islington council. So things are starting to get official. We thought about a pre-nup, but as we’ll both be broke when this is all over, there hardly seems much point.

Bitter and Twisted

You’d expect religious zealots and the loony right to attack Civil Partnerships, but more annoying is the negativity on the concept of two men having a relationship coming from gay people.

Channel 4′s recent drama, Clapham junction, was billed as a look at modern gay life, and instead showed a myopic melee of cottaging and fumbling on Hampstead Heath. There was a Civil Partnership ceremony, during which one of the guys getting hitched decided to seduce a waiter.

Similarly, I’ve just finished reading Bruce Benderson’s book The Romanian, where he revels in his relationship with a Romanian rent-boy as going against the norm, because if he had a traditional relationship, he may as well be straight. Personally, I don’t call paying for a relationship avant garde and daring, I call it a bit pathetic.

In Particular, Clapham Junction’s message seemed to be that Lesbians and Gay men cannot get complacent, with hate crimes on the rise, and this much is true. But it jarred that the only loving relationship depicted a man who couldn’t be faithful during his own civil partnership ceremony.

Gay-themed dramas don’t come along often, so is it really too much to ask to see gay men in non-conflicted and loving relationship, instead of being either massively promiscuous (Queer as Folk) asexual (Will and Grace) or entering relationships that end in tragedy (Brokeback Mountain).

While it’s much harder to make good drama out of happy characters, it often comes across that writers of gay books and TV shows are a little bitter and twisted, obsessed with the darker side of it all, so much so that it often reads like self-loathing.

Most of the gay men I know, whether in relationships or not – are actually happy. And while we cannot be complacent as to how far things have come – try holding hands with your partner in Tottenham instead of Tottenham Court Road – it’s a shame that too often writers default to doom and despair that at times seems outdated and unnecessary.

In Local News…

The Brokeback / Civil Partnership effect seems to have reached the provincial press, as evidenced by this poster ad for our esteemed local rag. On the one hand, isn’t it wonderful that positive, man-on-man romance makes front page news. Once upon a time, the only mention of gay men in the local press was in the court reports.

On the downside, gay love suddenly feels very mainstream, mingling with all those non-stories about parking ticket disputes, anti-mobile phone mast rallys (organised via T-Mobile of course) and milk bottle thefts. What happened to the sense of deviance, furtiveness and danger?

Oh well, at least they still know how to use the endangered apostrophe, otherwise the headline could have read “Gay Couples Love Pledge” – an exciting expose of the favourite furniture polish of the gay community. Which is just the kind of appallingly mundane article the Walthamstow Guardian likes to feature whilst overlooking all the murders, money laundering and drug dealing in the area. I guess investigating all that is far too much effort.

Picture this…

So, Brokeback Mountain was not quite the greatest film since the dawn of time, and Civil Partnerships have already turned into a commercial tug-of-war between companies offering pink Rolls Royces to gay people with no taste.

One nice side effect though of these two recent events is that picture editors throughout the land now have some rather more appealing pictures to accompany stories about gay issues: hunky cowboys and happy Lib-Dem MPs tying the knot.

Makes a change from that one picture of two clones in leather caps at some Pride event circa 1986 that always used to get pulled from the archives…