David Herkt (Photo: Fryderyck Kublikowski/JACK Magazine) Writer, poet, editor and commentator David Herkt is the creative force behind High Times, a TV3 documentary series on NZ drug culture starting Thursday 21st July at 8:30pm. Who are you and what's your background? Existential questions were never my speciality. For a long time I refused to be a gender or a sexual orientation. I was not going to be bound by the rule of words. I'd only admit to being David Herkt. It still seems a fairly good way of dealing with things. Born in 1955, went barefoot to a country school for most of my childhood. By the time I was a teenager in the suburbs, I had a boyfriend and I was eventually expelled from school in 1972 for being both gay and a problem-student. It took me a week to fight my way back to readmission. Joined Gay Liberation in 1974. Played the character who got the boy in the end of NZ's first gay movie Squeeze (1979). Emigrated to Australia the same year. Extensively mispent my youth in numerous spectacular ways. Have worked everywhere from aluminium smelters to fashionable clubs and bars. Have dealt drugs and have consorted with murderers and thieves. Am an award-winning Australian poet and essayist. After the advent of HIV/AIDS and halfway through a PhD I got offered a job that not only gave me a grounddfloor view of how a nation established a response to an epidemic but also gave me a large number of lessons in human behaviour. Returned to NZ in 1997. Edited express. Took QN from a sidelined late-night TV programe to a winner of Best Factual Series. Fired in the wake of the Mike Hosking-Jonathan Marshall Stalking Scandal. Co-founder of nztabloid.com. Currently a TV director, free-lance journalist, co-editor of JACK magazine, and pet-owner. What was the starting point for High Times, your new documentary? There is a hypocrisy behind our society's usage of drugs that is not only dishonest but also dangerous. In Australia, when I worked in the HIV/AIDS field found myself in charge of a needle-exchange for thirty minutes in the course of the worker's lunchbreak. A 15-year-old boy came in and wanted a syringe. I talked to him. It transpired that he'd had been given a dose of heroin the previous day and, because of the hysterical exagerations about drug-use he thought he was instantly addicted and would suffer huge withdrawals so he went out and purchased some more heroin. This taught me that the exagerations and misinformation around drug-use are probably more lethal than any drug. I also have a passion for history; if we don't remember it we are condemned to repeat it. High Times is a 3-part examination of New Zealanders doing drugs 1960-2005 and I was rewarded by the honesty of my interviewees and a subject that had been previously untouched. No documentary maker could have asked for anything more. What characterises the New Zealand GLBT community for you? It is a community that has lost its way and has sold-out its birthright, its history, the lessons it learned in the Dark Years and the Years of Struggle, in order to become a plastic same-sex figures at the top of a wedding cake. Fuck civil unions, I say. Lets agitate to give heterosexuals our styles of relationships, sex-on-site venues and our sense of humour. I never wanted to be like a heterosexual. I still don't. Gay men managed their relationships perfectly well without the intrusion of law for generations.The only people who truly profit by recent legislation are lawyers. You may as well start filling in your automatic payment slips now. What is the worst thing for you about being GLBT? Two men booking into a hotel or motel and them offering you a twin-share. That and having to endure the misguided do-gooders in the community who want to normalise me. What is the best thing? Getting into someone else's pants, that delicious discovery of pubic hair and a softness that, hey, isn't so soft anymore, and discovering that yes, we are both male, and there are some wonderful things we can do together including some perfectly charming power games where just who is going to do what to whom becomes important until it all dissolves into something white and delightful, that the French call jouissance and we could call bliss, but is prretty damn good whatever its name. Relationship status? The columnist Rosemary McLeod recently gave me the best words for it. She said I had a base relationship and a satellite relationship. For some reason I have always, through my entire life, been happiest with two partners. My primary relationship is with John Flack, chef at Auckland's Mikano restuarant. We have lived together for 28 years, but he says its been day-by-day since the beginning. We have no intention of solemnising our relationship. Every night I sleep with him, I just marvel at who he is and how much I love him. My satellite relationship for the last three years has been with Jonathan Marshall, former QN host, former paparazzo, former private-detective, currently a House DJ. It has recently ended. I do not miss him. Despite my best efforts he always was a little c*nt. However I do possibly miss the relationship. So if you are between 18 and 30, goodlooking, intelligent, just want to have fun, be loved to bits, share your life as I'll share mine, get trashed regularly, laugh heaps, plot social mayhem, have someone always on side, and lots of etceteras, write to me care of GayNZ.com. The photo at the top of the page probably looks like shit because cameras don't like me which explains why I work behind one. Favourite food and drink? Drink? Mmmm, vodka. There is something so wonderful about the way a straight vodka falls into your glass, that I could make hour-long commercials for it. Current fave vodka? 42 Below, unflavoured. Fuck Feijoa. Perennial Favourite? Stolilichnaya. Will drink if desperate? My primary partner's father's vodka which he distills in his back shed in Upper Hutt. Food? I am currently enjoying Halva, a Middle Eastern sweet made from sesame seeds and glucose. It is addictive. I also like anything with huge amounts of vanilla in it. I am spoilt because my primary partner is a chef who likes cooking at home. Worst habit? My best friend Julian says it is is 'Blinded By Beauty'. He says I lay myself open to all sorts of lunacy because I am 'BLINDED BY BEAUTY' (he said it in caps too!). Most noble feature? Loyalty. Once I offer you myself you have all of me, my ability, my faith, my love, for ever and a day. Favourite TV programme? I am not interested much in what passes for TV currently. I love music videos. I also spend a lot of time making lo-rez short video clips for myself on my laptop using found internet footage. I must have made more than forty of them in the last few months. My favourite is to a track by Fennesz called Circassian, where I use six minutes of home movies shot by American soldiers on homeleave from the Vietnam War 1968-1972. My eleven minute World Trade Centre /Challenger Disaster to Thomas Tallis' Spem in Alium also works. I am currently working on slo-mo'd faces of Russian male pornstars getting fucked and thousands of rocket-launches to Laurie Andersons 'O Superman', lo-rez helicopter gunships to a mash-up of MC5's 'Kick Out The Jams', an American f-16 bombing and strafing mission to a 5 minute piece of 1970's muzac, and I'm searching for a track to back a whole series of amateur movies of rain I have been collecting. Short Answer? I don't watch much TV now. I prefer making my own. Favourite movie? First to mind? Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1972 movie Arabian Nights. Second to mind? Tarkovsky's movie Solaris, not that shitty recent remake. Third to Mind? Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron. Fourth? Greg Arraki's Doom Generation with the proviso that I haven't seen his Mysterious Skin yet. I could go on forever. When I see a good movie it automatically tops my list until I see the next good movie, but good movies are rarer than you think. Qualities you most appreciate in a GLBT person? Just being a vibrant, interesting, and life-affirming person who laughs a lot, fuck the GLBT part. I am not interested in categories. What are you reading at the moment? I tend to read large numbers of books simultaneously. I am part way through The Secret Conferences of Dr Goebbels 1939-1943, Chinese Poetry edited and translated by Wai-Lim Yip, The Volga Rises In Europe by Curzio Malaparte (for the third time), the script for Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard, Idoru by William Gibson (third or fourth time), J.G. Ballard Quotes, Selected Poems and Prose by Paul Celan, The Mysterious William Shakespeare by Charlton Ogburn, A History of Gay Literature by Gregory Woods,The Lure of the Limerick by W.S. Baring-Gould, Great Mysteries of The Air by Ralph Barker, and Bruce Chatwin's What Am I Doing Here. There are about twenty more on my bedside table but I only pick them up and glance in them to read a sentence or two occasionally. Who in the world including NZ would you most like to have a coffee and a chat with? It would be a table-full and it probably wouldn't be coffee: Charlotte Dawson because she's fun and has a perceptive honed intelligence, Gore Vidal because he's a historical gossip and I like historical gossip, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt because now that he's grown-up from being in Third Rock From the Sun and is playing male hookers in movies he's right in my demographic, Graham Capill because I'd like to know what makes him tick and how he feels about everything now, Rosemary McLeod because she's like Charlotte except with a journalistic background, David Irving because he's a fount of knowledge about the Third Reich and I am interested in it and can live with his politics, Errol Hincksman, the only survivor of the Mr Asia Syndicate leadership because he's got a fund of great stories, and I'd best stop now otherwise it'll be an Academy Award Speech where I feel obliged to mentioned friends, cousins and cats. Role models? William S. Burroughs, American writer, junky and visionary. Burroughs created the world we live in and the way we deal with it. I owe him everything and so do you. What is the most pressing issue currently facing the NZ GLBT population? To stop being a bunch of boring people and getting back to being interesting. There is a very good reason why eight year olds use the term 'gay' to apply to something dull and stupid. When even eight year olds have noticed it, you know its time to change. If you could have one wish granted what would it be? To make all the things I have in my head while being surrounded by people I love and enjoy. GayNZ.com - 16th July 2005