A little rant from PONYBOYS, my zine of days gone by :)

PLEASE GET HELP

It grieves our hearts to have to say this, but we feel we no longer have a choice. We have tried to be kind. We hoped you would learn the error of your ways, particularly as they have been pointed out to you from all camps for quite some time now. To some extent, we tried to ignore you, and, fortunately, the development of modern technology has allowed us that option to an increasing extent. However, a problem does not go away by itself, and you have been resorting to your bad habits again, and thinking you can hide or deny it by doing it to a different set of victims (Bleeding Rose Bookstore in Victoria, British Columbia instead of Little Sisters in Vancouver or Glad Day Bookstore in Toronto; to Charlotte Cooper, a relative unknown, instead of Dennis Cooper or Pat Califia). Clearly, your illness and pathology have metastasized and deepened respectively, and an intervention is the only path left to us.



You seem to have a difficult time distinguishing between what’s MINE and what’s YOURS, which, frankly, most people decipher by about kindergarten.



Here is some elementary capitalism, which even someone like me, who would dance in cha-cha heels on Conrad Black’s grave (preferably while he’s buried alive so he can enjoy it), can grasp. If I order something from someone, and I send them money, and you steal it, YOU HAVE TO PAY ME BACK – at the very least, you should let me know you’re the schoolyard bully who’s taking my lunch, and give me a chance to fight you to reclaim it! And, furthermore, if you say you didn’t steal it but are, instead, ‘protecting’ me from my own choices, I should point out, as Virginia Woolf did more or less in her classic work Three Guineas, that you are extending a patronizing and oppressive system of censorship and state control to me and calling it love, when, really, it’s more the kind of ‘love’ that little boys who don’t know about the boundaries of people’s bodies and dignity claim they are administering in back alleys, cars and bars with Rohypnol rickeys.



Though this is exactly the sort of image you would seize if it appeared in a magazine, no doubt, do NOT piss on my back and tell me it’s rain…



And this is the point where your sickness will truly manifest itself, and you will attempt to justify your actions by bringing up someone like Robin Sharpe, whose work I’m to find repugnant due to its sadistic and pedophilic tendencies (as it happens, I DO find him somewhat disturbing) – this is the sort of thing you’re protecting me from. Well, thank you, and what a representative example! Anyway, the courts have ruled that the mere writing of or drawing of such things is not criminal, no matter how tasteless it may seem – and, if you disagree with the courts (and god knows you do, because you have DISOBEYED their rulings so many times – are you not a government agency? Do you NOT have to follow the rules set out by those who oversee you? Of course, they often do not either, but that is beside the point…), militate for appeals and clarification, if you must (god knows you NEED clarity – gentlemen, you once banned lesbian erotica with no dildos, tongues or fingers in use upon the relevant region, on the grounds of ‘anal penetration’. Perhaps some elementary anatomy lessons should be administered?).



Besides, boyfriends (and you ARE boys, dears, because isn’t it funny how a fair amount of degrading imagery about women, or even, oh, women being fucked up the ass isn’t, as it were, diddled with by you AT ALL, but let one male asshole be violated, and civilization’s collapse is imminent…), you are NOT protecting anyone by keeping a picture out. Pictures represent the culture or, more accurately, its hypocrisies and secret desires, and, for better or worse, there are going to be JonBenet Ramsays whether you remove every bit of pornography in the world or not.



Until you are willing to admit that you are scared little boys who cannot deal with your own repressed homoerotic desires, or, in a best-case scenario, your conflicts with depictions of sexual realities that are clearly shared by a fair number of people who wish to consume those images (you aren’t trying to stand in the way of the Free Market, are you? I rebuke you in the name of Adam Smith…), we must insist you refrain from looking at any art coming into the country – if someone objects to something, and must have legal recourse, let that person bring charges. You are clearly so deeply embedded in your psychoses and delusions that you cannot be relied upon to make rational decisions about what people WHO PAY YOUR SALARIES and (some of) whom HAVE BRAINS UNCLOUDED BY UGLY ANTI-SEX ATTITUDES OR DENIAL LOOPS should be allowed to see (hint: I can’t remember ever consulting my PARENTS over what I ‘should’ read, so why would I turn that task over to a bunch of faceless bureaucrats?), so we beg of you…

PLEASE GET HELP!