Out and About
20 June

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Singer pleads with legion of teenage girl fans
to recognise importance of his feelings

Boyzone star declares that he is homosexual

And here's something else you didn't know - there's going to be an eclipse later this year.

Actually, I got the smart comment from Phil but I liked it so much I cribbed it with impunity.

So, Stephen Gately, 23, has announced that he is a homosexual in order to stop someone making a lot of money by spilling the beans to a tabloid journal. Well, there are worse reasons for coming out. At least he told his family some years ago. And at least he can now openly acknowledge his boyfriend, Eloy de Jong, 26, who used to be part of a Dutch boyband called Caught In The Act.

Well good luck to them both. I look forward to the next pop awards. Stephen appears on stage. Blue light. Dry Ice. He begins singing Endless Love. The crowd are perplexed. This is a duet. The moment for the second voice arrives and another male voice is heard. It is Eloy. A spot catches him at the rear of the stage. He walks slowly to the front of the stage. The crowd go wild. Both boys are front stage duetting but at either side of the stage. During the final stanza, they cross slowly to centre stage arriving together at the final bars. Will they kiss? Only real life will tell.

Sigh!

Most of this has been around on gay NewsGroups and Bulletin Boards for a while. When will the tabloids give us the stories of Ronan Keating's bisexuality? And him being found in bed with another male pop star by his wife who took this as her cue to trash his car. Will we hear more of the high hurdler Colin Jackson? Not that I am one to repeat gossip. Which is why I have said this only once.

Cardinal Basil Hume has died. Lots of people seem to be checking out before the millennium.

Rod arrived on Thursday. We had a good meal and conversation with Colin. Ross was in my bed when we got home.

Friday we lazed around a lot and Rod and Ross got to like each other. In the afternoon we went to see The Matrix and I loved it and I loved Keanu and I loved the play on the idea that everything is information/data to be processed. We dined at Trattoria La Ruga in Walthamstow where I haven't eaten for a while and which, whilst still good, did not feel excellent and therefore slightly overpriced.

Saturday brought a trip into town for Rod and I. Lunch in St Martin's in the Fields crypt and then the National Gallery. We spent time with Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus which is one of Rod's favourite paintings. It's certainly a dramatic scene at the moment of recognition by the disciples that the person who has just broken bread is the risen Christ.

And the painting is a tour de force with not one but two arms painted as coming straight out of the picture frame. And in the bottom left of the painting, Cleophas, caught in the moment of about-to-leap-up, like a coiled spring. And we took the composition of the painting apart to see how the lines of the painting held the torso within a tight square fixed into that bottom corner whilst the head burst out into the main body of the canvas aiding that sense of the leap-about-to-happen.

And we took in Constable's The Haywain, which I explained is part of every English middle class child's mythology of rural England and Turner's The Fighting Téméraire which is an allegory of the death of sail at sunset, being dragged to the scrapyards by a dirty steam tug.

I couldn't find my favourite Monet Waterlilies so we went on to the Renaissance and the Cranachs and the Holbeins which were not to my taste and Bronzino's Portrait of Piero de Medici which was. He's a beautiful boy with luscious lips that are meant to be kissed. And he's dressed in a chaste and demure black.

But behind him are voluptuous salmon pink drapes which are quite tinged with eroticism. He is certainly a youth to be desired. But down in the bottom left is some strange statuary - ruddy in colour. An older figure with vine leaves in its hair, possibly a Bacchus. And a younger cherub delightful. But the Bacchus for all his flushed desires has no arms and therefore cannot touch.

Then the earlier work which I like sporadically but love Botticelli's Venus and Mars and Cosimo's A Mythological Subject because it is off the wall and no-one knows what it is on about.

We ate at Ballen's on Old Compton Street before bussing it to Islington and Sadler's Wells Theatre for Handel's Water Music and Purcell's Dido and Æneas. The former was quite poorly played and the 18th Century Dance did nothing for me. But the opera was fine and Della Jones sang well and was affecting in the plaint When I am laid in earth.

I was up at 5am on Sunday to get Rod to Heathrow and though I returned to bed did not sleep properly. So it was a quiet day.

I spent some time scanning images on Sunday. I've added some new photographs of my family and parents, my cousin Trevor, Rod and Dale, Chris and me in San Francisco by the Golden Gate Bridge. I've also added some new pages - one for Mary and a quick family tree for the male line of the Guys.

I watched Saving Private Ryan in the evening over a bottle of wine. It is an admirably good film with a very strange end. Ryan survives. I don't think I give too much away by saying this. But one of his fellow soldiers dies saying "Earn this".

A long time ago I might have found something noble in such statements. But the film cuts back to the future where an elderly Ryan is wracked with guilt at surviving not knowing whether his life was worth the loss of life. And I felt "How cruel to encumber someone else's future with the burden of being worthy of your sacrifice!"