GAY TO Z: ABBA, AFTER PARTIES, ANAL, AB FAB.

A DICTIONARY GUIDE TO STUFF GAYS LOVE COMPILED BY PAUL JOSEPH AND TIM BENZIE

ABBA

Forget Mamma Mia the appalling movie and atrocious musical – ABBA songs aren’t about Amanda Seyfried goat-screaming in a taverna to a hens-do crowd.

ABBA are the ultimate supergroup with a peerless back catalogue of pop and disco perfection and yearning ballads. The beautiful melodies and crisp Scandinavian diction imbue every lyric with emotion.

The band themselves were iconic – the aloof, beautiful blonde; the saucy brunette; the hot bear; and the other one – and they weren’t afraid of some dodgy fashion or an ozonedestroying application of hairspray.

Winning Eurovision already positioned them as gay icons, but with their music featuring in two camp Aussie films, Muriel’s Wedding and Priscilla, their elevation was complete.

Their final album, The Visitors was recorded as the band imploded, and contained some of their darkest and arguably finest music, proving that the standard of their output never faltered.

To this day, their work permeates our lives; The Winner Takes It All for break-up melancholy, Voulez Vous for poppers-o-clock dancefloor flirting and, of course, Dancing Queen will have everyone on their feet at a wedding.

ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS

Born of a French And Saunders sketch, Absolutely Fabulous featured Jennifer Saunders as PR guru Edina, and Joanna Lumley as Patsy, magazine fashion director and Eddie’s best friend/enabler.

Central to the show was the inversion of the mother/daughter relationship between Eddie and long-suffering daughter Saffy, who struggles for normality against the childish, self-indulgent hedonism and desperate neediness of her mother. Along the way, it ruthlessly lampooned fashion, politics and popular culture.

Inspired by its language and unapologetic portrayal of excess, the gays embraced the opportunity to end out sentences with “sweetie” and down “Bolli-Stolis” (a cocktail of champagne and vodka) with a cigarette hanging from the corner of the mouth. This was the validation of a good time that we needed at the time.

Though quality was inconsistent across six series, several specials and a movie, Eddie and Patsy will always be icons for the sheer strength of characterisation and brilliance of performance from Saunders and Lumley. We all hope that when we pass through the Pearly Gates it’ll be these two has-beens waiting for us with the cocktails on the other side.

AFTER-PARTIES

There are whole venues, events and a subculture dedicated to welcoming the glorious gurners who have partied all night and just aren’t ready to quit.

Originally known as recovery parties, they offered a more laidback environment for those whose “assistance” had worn off. That’s how they started. Then they became destinations in their own right. Who else but society’s most notorious hedonists (us!) would set an alarm for 4am in order to rise and start partying?

Of course, before they were edgy and glamorous, we loved them for their very shabby chic: party trash bags filling the laneways outside sunny pubs, or the light-averse holding down a couch in a darkened lounge, coming down… and maybe going back up again.

In the age of social media, these are not events from which one should post instaselfies; one’s butt sagging from sweaty chaps, one’s mascara frightening the horses.

ANAL

Of course, straight people love “taking one up the wrong ’un” too. But for us, this peccadillo has had a long and, ah-hem, penetrating history.

We’ve been identified entirely based on bumming – stoned as sodomites and arrested as arse bandits, with anal sex codified into criminal law to keep us down and low.

For straight men, it’s been a source of ongoing and paradoxical fascination: we’re both a threat in showers with slippery soaps, but also hopelessly feminised perverts who let ourselves be violated.

In the meantime, we’ve been making fashion (hanky codes) and art (Tom Of Finland) about our insatiable cornholing.

We identify according to our predilections with little fear of stereotyping, knowing that Mr Masc Active might just be another Needy Top, who’ll fold like a doily when backed into a corner by a Bossy Bottom.

Buggery feels like our thing: think of the military precision with which we prepare for potential incursions, ensuring a sparse, clean space to greet new objects with Marie Kondolike joy.

So, are we surprised that hetero lads are now hazing their way into Vegemite Valley? As if. We’ve always had them pegged.