Come for the waves, stay for the delicious
sweets…
The boys went on a Ments trip last year.
FukkYeahThaBoyz.
I’d been invited but thought bugger it, the Ments is shithouse,
I’ll stick to my usual dose of wobbly garbage at Curl Curl.
Maybe the island chain dancing off Sumatra was golden back when
Slats was forced to bunker down with Hoyo, Quikkie’s most
inexplicably bizarre barrel-hunting duo, while being ferried ‘em
all over from one insane set up to the next, Hoyo yelling out
fuck yeh non-stop and Jimmy Slade eyeing off the camera,
in between weaving fifteen-second jungle tubes.
That was then.
This is now: you get wedged in with a bunch of international
deadbeats from Australia to Japan to Hawaii to Merika to Brazil to
France to Finland, all fighting and flaring for the wave of their
life, man, while you’re trying not to do too much unnecessary
bark-scraping on the Surgeon’s Table or get yelled at by the
steroid-jacked Paraguayan boogieboarder who thinks cage fighting to
the death is art mate.
Nah, not for me.
The place can get stuffed.
Well, luckily there are finer steeds than I still keen and
willing to tackle the place and they always seem to report back
they bloody loved it.
Fair enough.
What sparked my interest, while being inundated with the pics of
this odyssey I’d avoided, was just how extraordinarily gay the trip
looked.
Not gay as in lame. Gay as in Athenian Olympics, Greco-Roman
wrestling, Aristotle, Socrates and Oscar Wilde, the Village People
getting chock-a-block at the YMCA, Tom Hanks succumbing to High
Five in Philadelphia, Ricky Martin He Bangs HE BANGS, he looks like
a flower, he stings my ring piece. Gay.
Fit lads, all tanned up and shirtless, getting grogged and
hugging, sweating all over each other, hollering I luv ya, I
luv ya, I luv ya, no females within a few hundred k radius,
minimum.
Super gay.
And I love gay.
My father’s gay. My son’s gay. My husband’s gay. I love the
gays. I love the gayness. I’ve seen the future. And the future is
really, really, really gay.
Yet surfing culture is trapped precariously between the staunch
manliness of a bygone era and the armpit-shaving regimens of our
current crop of elite stepfather-approval-seekers.
Are surfers ready to face up to how intensely and wonderfully
and perfectly gay surfing is?
We dedicate our lives to tight rubber and boardshorts, to
smearing sunscreen on each other’s backs in the carpark, to
splashing cutty waffle in each other’s faces in the lineup, to
watching barely grown men prance top to bottom, bottom to top, on
glassy lumps of ocean blue.
We gayz wistfully to the horizon, bore non-surfers to tears with
Point Break quotes, travel to the emptiest corners of the earth
surrounded exclusively with each other’s testosterone to camp under
the stars, cuddle up close in the roar of a romantic fire and fall
asleep with sweet, sweet dreams of deep, juicy pits.
*Liam Carroll is the author of confessional roman à
clefs Slippery and Sweet Dreams of
Fanta, which you can buy
here. He’s also a commodities trader,
physiotherapist and massive kook.
