Felix Herbener

I should have asked to live in care as a kid. I might have got medical help. I was 19 when I was cured and my life began again. I feel like they got to me and sealed my anus shut to control my behaviour before I even had a chance to act on my sexuality. I think some of them wanted me to get a sex change before I could shit too. Maybe it was to stop me getting bashed by homophobes. Stop the death toll of violence. I felt pretty violent when my anus was glued shut. Feel violent sometimes thinking about what they did to me. I was innocent, but it was so unsafe for me to be gay. I guess. My brother is such a mongoloid I could have turned out worse too.

Death to Haters.  

1997, the school bus to Beaudesert High School. I don't take a seat. There are boys who get on the bus before my stop. They tease me about stuff. Some of it is sexual in nature that is meant to titilate and hurt at the same time. I felt I was too young to be around such coarse vulgar teenagers. It was very degrading, some of the things they said to me. I never knew their names, I was afraid to face them. 2019, Gladstone Queensland. I meet this family of five brothers and in being around them things they say take me straight back to that bus. I can imagine them as the boys at the back of my high school bus. I even think I remember one of their names, and his habits. Could they have went to my school I don't know they said they were from there but I am not so sure. Anyway so I studied English at university and I am good at picking up on inuendo and bias in peoples speech. "He's proud of it" translates to "he's a shameless fag". "I pee in the showe...

If you have a cough it's just 5G measuring your vital statistics. It's millimetre wave. You will feel short of breath. They scan you with ultrasound beams from the satellites triangulated with the cell towers to make a 3D live map of everyone on earth. They probably chip you in your sleep so you wake up seeing augmented reality and don't even know. They could give you a holographic girlfriend.

 

2008/2009 Hobart City. T. is sitting on a circular bench at the bottom of the mall outside the National Australia Bank. She is wearing a similar black Adidas windbreaker to mine. "Is that you're camera?" she asks. "Is that a girl's jacket?". She proceeds to tell me off for taking photos. It tell her "Go home tonight and think about how Fearless's camera takes photos and is not a gun that shoots bullets". And I remember her saying something like why aren't you in school and I was like "I'm 27". And her telling me to be nicer to girls or something. And I was like "I'm not good genetic material" and then her look of disgust or pity that I did not need. T. has this mean look to her face, marred by acne, her eyes squint. She has a 'resting bitch face'. The whole time she is speaking she seems to have an ungodly interest in me. Maybe she has seen me taking photos before in town. Basically she treated me like a ...

Marsden Primary School 1994: Mark age 12(11, he always lied about his age) saying "fuck this, fuck that", then being asked by a teacher "what hole is to small to fuck?" and "Could you fuck that bolt hole in that timber seat? Go on then". "With a screwdriver" says Mark.  Mark called over to the teachers desk a few days after. A woman tells Mark she was raped by a screwdriver by a man when she was a girl. They speak in hushed serious tones. Mark asking me why I dress 'like a girl' "why do you wear girls clothes?". Mark being friendly with all the girls in year 7. Mark falling off his bike and getting stitches on his chin. Mark on my school bus in 1996/1997 with braces on his teeth. Going to Hills International College Jimboomba. Mark at Browns Plains bus interchange Logan City Brisbane, wearing shorts to below his knees. 2017. I meet Mark McGuiness aka Hayden in a private car park in South Gladstone Queensland. He is introduced by...

Sorry to break the fourth wall on this day of solidarity. But what LGBTIQ+ community? Where is this community? At UTAS during my BA I was the only one interested in a queer club. Seriously, it was just me and a guidance counselor sitting in a room. The elected head of the queer club never showed up. I met one gay guy at uni, and he was a self confessed cannibal wannabe. My experience of casual gay sex has made me have to harden my heart to NSA (no love/loveless) sex. My relationships last an hour or two. An overnight stay is as close to commitment and monogamy that I get. I can't even describe the heartbreaking soul aching loneliness of looking at other men's selfies on gay dating apps, night after night, month after month, and never meeting a guy to spend time with. If I cook for a man on a date it's like I'm doing something wrong. Is sharing a meal so strange? I'm not degrading the concept of IDAHOT. But as a Christian I think there is some problem with human natu...

An Aboriginal woman tried to stab me with a syringe and called me a nazi for being white. It was totally unprovoked, I was just sitting there. Another time late at night I got threatened with stabbing with needles of dog blood and being infected with aids. I am the most left wing person I know, but go to an Aboriginal community and you may find yourself unwelcome and unwanted. Text book studies of structural disadvantages and historical murders and current Aboriginal incarceration rates do not describe or articulate the feelings of Aboriginal people towards Australians. The latter is probably too unpalatable for study. And with Australia's high immigration and foreign work force, how many people are actually white anyway anymore? The idea of white privilege seems outdated in a neoliberal globalised economy. And now we are moving into a post-neoliberal New World Order with greenwashed ecofascism and no escape from electronic surveillance. The present moment excludes not just the aut...

Quetzalcoatl's Eyes II F#*k You

VEGAN EXTREMISTS F#*K OFF I can't afford Ugg boots. Not being allowed to drink milk and eat eggs without being shamed is insane. Wearing a rabbit fur and a duck down jacket how ridiculous! As if anyone does that. And I already bought a pink Mother's Day card for my mum. I'm with the workers and the poor, but living, and honestly trying to support local and seasonal produce. Recycling every scrap. Because we don't have money for Ugg boots or Cruise holidays or flights overseas. Or any money to waste at all. And milk money and the eggs and bacon we buy comes from the meagre sum we have to live on. And we are not bad people because we can't afford highly processed vegan food alternatives. I'm happy. In future people may be forced to eat lab grown meat and insect protein. But I don't want to live to see that. I don't want to live in that hell. We are all causing the Anthropocene. But we can only do so much in our lives to stop it. I won't...

ARE MEN IN THE AUSTRALIAN ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT CHEESOIDS? Does the Australian environmental movement exclude men? I liken my struggle to fit into the Australian environmental movement to the difficulties of the robot Cheesoid (from the Mitchel and Webb sketch) in learning the difference between petrol and cheese. I write these words with my phallic petrol pump spout mouth, clumsily trying to articulate a response to what I perceive is a disdain of men in the Australian environmental movement. A fellow member of our movement quoted journalist David Roberts accusing Michael Moore of 'mansplaining' in his film Planet of the Humans. This made me sad. Would the facts of the film present any diffently if it were written and presented by a woman? What is mansplaining and can be measured and quantified? Or is the quality to be disdained some intrinsic part of the male anatomy? I want to disclose some personal things I have experienced in a spirit of sharing towards increased un...

THE AGE OF NO KINDNESS I went through a stressful time in Gladstone last year. Seemingly everyone was unkind and I couldn't be kind to myself. Forgiveness also is something I struggle with. I experienced stress in high school from illness and bullying and I was unable to overcome it on my own. My brother and sister were not at home and we are not close to this day. My mother was unable to help me overcome the sources of stress in high school, and that still makes me feel sad. Last year I experienced physical trauma from injury, and I just didn't have support. I couldn't cope alone and so sold and gave away everything I owned. I think about mean things I think teenagers said to me on the highschool bus. For two years of highschool I was afraid to be on the bus, I stood near the driver. Fearing bullying, such as having my hair cut. Last year I met some people who reminded me so much of teenagers on that bus, and then I was assaulted and half sterilized. Since then, I thin...

DEAR XR I'm nearly 38 and I'm too old for this. I need to focus on myself. I can't listen to the same obvious solutions that are never implemented. It's been 20 years and I'm done. I won't be one of those tottering seniors who unfatiguably attend meetings with younger folk, I want a home and a homelife. I was always the only one without a car, and always the most left out. I lived in poorer suburbs where activism doesn't happen, ironically. When activism is the activity of the exclusively affluent, it is more pantomime than representative. XR is trying to shock with art, when what is shocking is the distance in worldview between the activist who stops a train and the citizen who intervenes. Keep fighting the general apathy if you like, but the environment I grew up in is already not the same anymore. Queensland is drought afflicted and yet votes go to mining interests while farmers and the reef suffers: I feel there is something cognitively wrong with tha...

There are no secure jobs unless you have a vocational qualification or university degree and your own vehicle. The liberal democratic multicultural immigration program is dissolving social bonds and making individuals compete with skilled foreigners. Welfare payments are below the poverty line and job services increasingly suspend payments for noncompliance. Cashless welfare cards are used to control how welfare is spent. Mothers are forced to look for work from their child's eighth birthday. Modern life is enabled by mobile phones, computers and the internet; all of which cost money. Buy food for a few days and you will have spent over $100. Alcohol and tobacco prices are kept artificially high by government. Rent is unaffordable for just about everyone. Car registration, insurance, loan repayment s.

FALSE PRIDE IN COAL The way Clermont locals reacted to the Bob Brown Stop Adani convoy is evidence of the lack of environmental science awareness and defecit of future focussed politics in Central Queensland. I lived there, there is nothing proudly patriotic about coal on beaches and coal dust on windowsills. There is nothing proudly Australian about the sickening pollution of minerals extraction and refinement. There is nothing beneficial to the local economy about jobs for a few, and poverty for the rest of the community. Central Queensland is a hopeless place where the glum fossil fuels factories pollute the skies and drug addiction and poverty defines everyday life.

POOR EDUCATION IS QUANTIFIABLE BY SOCIAL HARM Lack of adequate social welfare and chronically underfunded state schools and deregulated universities has lead to generations of Australians with inadequate literacy, poor numeracy, and sub-tertiary sociopolitical awareness. The corrosive effect of neoliberal 'reform' (cutbacks to social spending) to increase the wealth of the richest few is quantatively provable by social harm measured by poverty, mental illness, and suicide.

CATALOGUE OF HOMOPHOBIC BULLYING I EXPERIENCED IN GLADSTONE 4680 People using a nasal camp voice around me for no apparent reason other than to alert others that a gay man (me) was in their presence. Ocurrances: Walking on the street × 1, In a car being driven ×1, In a relationship × 1 (multiple occasions). Total 3 occurances. People using the word gay in my presence for no apparent reason other than to slight myself. Occurances: Walking on the street ×1, In a shop ×1. Total 2 occurances. People playing gay anthems for no apparent reason other than to get to me (as if I would enjoy that). Occurances: my neighbours ×1 (multiple occasions). Total 7 occurances. People referring to gay interest film in my presence for no apparent reason other than to alert others to the fact a person was in their presence (me). Occurances: At a party ×1. Total 1 occurance. People claiming no knowledge of Nimbin Mardigrass when I mentioned it and thinking I was talking and Sydney Gay and Le...

MYSTERY YOUNG MAN I am still struggling with thoughts about a young person I assisted in Gladstone. A young man who told me he was 14 and homeless. He  had made the aquiantance of a 42 year old gay man calling him his uncle. This man was not his uncle and I was disturbed by his association with a minor. I decided, based on what the young person told me, to assist him by taking him to child protection. I did this and he was interviewed privately before being asked to remain in the building. I was told nothing. A couple of weeks later I saw the young person again and he told me he was living in a youth shelter. He would come to my house sometimes during the day. Months passed and I started speaking out about the sexual inappropriateness of the man he called his uncle. I posted my opinion on Facebook. In Gladstone this man was watching my public Facebook posts and saw it. The young man took offence to it and punched me in the mouth outside Centrelink. I reported the ...

FOR THE ABUSED M invited me next door to D's house to play cards with D's son who was 12 or 13 and two other boys under the age of 12. D's son was big for his age, whereas the other two boys were smaller than average and skinny. The smallest was only just able to play cards sensibly and was given assistance by D's son. The three boys and M sat at D's kitchen table while D stood in the kitchen. M's usually loud voice became even louder as he played cards. D's son's voice was raised also. I felt uncomfortable and moved away to leave, but sensing this D said "stay". I stayed and D said "and that's how you play with boys". Then M said in a camp voice "Oh my god Betty, look at her butt, it's so big and ROUND" and he kept repeating it loudly. I felt this was inappropriate. Then M started touching the boy next to him in a show of affection, like a cuddle. The boy, effeminate looking, didn't seem upset. But ...

COVID-19   OUTBREAK And just like that HIV is airborne. Thanks to a mutated coronavirus HIV is no longer "the gay disease". This pandemic removes the stigma of HIV from gay men, whereas marriage equality did not. It is a new paradigm. Just as COVID-19 is not a "Chinese virus", HIV is no longer a "gay disease".

IS HIV A GENDER PRONOUN? All gay men are considered either HIV negative or positive. In this article I consider if the HIV label could serve a second purpose to categorise the entire population of homosexuals. I have imagined a third gender 'hiv' to describe homosexual males and females, as distinct from heterosexuals who are either him or her. And here comes some crazy. When we depart from science into common language (with multiple word definitions) something happens; we get a fusion of fiction and fact that somehow describes reality better than science. What if HIV is a gender? What if HIV is a conspiracy to track gays? It may also be a blood borne disease (but so are children) but is there value or truth in my idea? Could it be that a 'HIV'/ hiv is a man with the mind of a woman/ gay man? Could it be that scientists and government thought 'how can we track these genetic mutants?' What if scientists thought up this answer: to link the hiv gender wit...