Partner.  Is it just me, or did that word once signify a subtle way of not specifying the gender of one's lover?  And didn't more queer than straight people use it, or have I been fooling myself?  In my often muddled mind, when I lived in the United Kingdom in the nineties, "partner" was a useful signal that you were in fact talking to a queer person, because straight people just said girlfriend or boyfriend without fear of being discriminated against for it and of course, in those days, only...

I referred to someone idly as a dyke the other day and she said, "I'm no dyke!" although her Facebook profile intimated that she was into women.  I looked at a photo, saw long hair and light dawned.  "Oh HO!" quoth I to myself, "She is one of many lesbians who think that dyke equates to butch."  So I returned to the relevant chat window and said, "Dyke doesn't equal butch these days, we've reclaimed it from being a derogatory term applied by homophobes and have made it into a good, strong wor...

I love photographing drag kings and queens - my only complaint is that there aren't nearly enough drag kings in South Africa.  If I had the (ho ho) bollocks to perform, I'd start doing it myself.  Anyway, while photographing a gay beauty pageant and cabaret in East London the other night, I thought about the last time I photographed lots of drag queens - which was Johannesburg Pride 2008.  It gave me a lot of great photographs and some new Facebook friends ... there was one particularly nasty...