Australian Graffiti

Thursday finds me wondering how much echinacea tea you have to drink to beat an ear infection. I hate echinacea tea; it tastes vile. It also works. One has to wonder if it would be effective used as a douche in the aural cannal, or if you HAVE to swallow the stuff. I suspect the latter.

To divert myself from the fact my left ear is killing me, I turn my threadbare attention to the few pages I have left to prepare for the upcoming website relaunch; and today I tackle the subject of gay science fiction. (It's either that, or proofread AQUAMARINE, and right now I think the virus in my ear is trying to get into my sinuses, and since I'm seeing double I wouldn't trust myself to proofread a laundry list.)

The gay SF I've ben talking about for the last hour or so is print-media ... books. I'd been wondering if I would take on the challenge of gay SF in movies and TV, but decided to leave it alone for the moment, because it can be such an aggravating topic. For example, don't get me started on Star Trek. It's very easy to blow breakers on that subject ... which is to say, how is it possible to do 28 full SEASONS of an *SF* show, and never have so much as a single gay guest character, never mind a series regular?! Then again, STARGATE is up to 14 seasons, counting SG1 and Atlantis, and if there's been a gay guest character, I must have blinked when s/he bolted through.

Speaking of Trek, cheers to George Takei, everyone's favorite starship driver, who is wedding his partner of many years, with the welcome shift in California's gay marriage laws. Wonderful stuff.

So, I stuck with novels for the Gay SF discussion; but the 'research' I did for the backgrounding did land me on some interesting websites ... which just pointed out how thin on the ground gay SF heroes are, because in order to get to Ten Favorite Gay SF Heroes, they had to count Frank N. Furter and Bunny Wigglesworth! Well, you could list them, I guess; but is ROCKY HORROR really SF? And I'm fairly sure ZORRO THE GAY BLADE is a comedy western. Will we stretch a point and call them fantasies? Hmmm.

All of which brings me around to wondering if any TV network in this state is going to be carrying the rest of TORCHWOOD, or if they've abandoned the show. It premiered in the 9:30 timeslot, migrated to past-midnight, and vanished without a trace. South Australia is notorious for this kind of reception of TV science fiction. Even STARGATE, which is smash-hit by local standards, is late-late-late-show fare. FIREFLY was marooned in the same slot, and most of STAR TREK VOYAGER didn't seem to air down here at all ...

I hear you asking what South Aussies actually watch. There's a lot of football (by which I mean Aussie Rules, VFL, NFL, that sort of thing). If you're lucky, they'll squeak in a rugby game between the endless tennis tournaments and the reality TV, but only if it's Rugby League. Heaven help you if you have an insatiable lust for Rugby Union. The All Blacks versus the Springbocks? Be still, my beating heart ... not that any such game is likely to be seen on local free-to-air TV. Because the Wallabies aren't on the field. Fishing shows. Cooking. Lots of cooking. And one show where they yank the fish out and cook them right there on the boat -- I kid you not. It's called OUT OF THE BLUE, 'starring' the senior brother in the big local private fisheries company. The longer, warmer, dryer days of October bring a welcome end to the Aussie Rules season, and the beginning of the cricket season; TV becomes the pixelic equivalent of the Sargasso Sea, with reality TV reruns, rained-off test matches which cause Channel 9 to rerun 10-year-old games, and reruns of old cooking shows.

Yes, Keegan owns a TV set. Also a DVD player. Thank gods for DVDs.

And now, I'm on my way to the kitchen, to brew some more echinacea tea.