And Yvonne, if I’ve understood her, never stopped thinking about me. One of the most touching things she said to me when eventually we met and sat down and talked for the first time was that every year on my birthday she would try to spend the day alone, unencumbered, if possible, by any distracting duties, and think about me. She said it very gently and simply, as if I must have known. ‘But I didn’t do it this year,’ she said. As if she had known.
5.
Another Disgrace
Yvonne’s first visit to our house was going well. There’d been a small catastrophe as she arrived—the strap on one of the new white shoes she’d bought for the occasion had snapped as she was coming down our steep front steps. But Peter had manfully mended it. And he’d fried the bream and made the salad while we talked. And now, lunch and easy table conversation over, Yvonne and I were out on the back balcony overlooking the ocean at Manly. It was hot and the conversation was slowing down. You’d think nothing could be simpler, wouldn’t you? Two people attached by the strongest bonds there are, two whole lives to recount, so many unexpected stories to tell. Yet it wasn’t easy. Conversation grows out of a sense of something shared: an interest in gardening, Sanskrit, friends, anything. We were mother and son but had shared nothing at all. Yvonne hadn’t even known my name. As time has gone on we’ve listened to so many stories about each other’s lives that we’ve begun to feel we’ve shared a lot, but on that afternoon on the hill at Manly we were still both hovering over the relationship.
In mid-afternoon there was a longish silence. We both gazed out across Manly to the ocean. I thought I’d take the plunge. Why not begin the relationship on a firm, frank footing before awkward expectations were built up?
‘You realise, Yvonne, that Peter and I live together, don’t you?’ There was a slight pause and then she said almost exactly what I would’ve said in the same circumstances: ‘What do you mean by “live together”?’ It had been many years since I’d had to choose my words so carefully. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I mean we’re a couple.’
There was another longish pause. ‘I see,’ she said, and I knew she was suddenly seeing the jigsaw from a completely different angle and that it was causing her, if not pain, then some serious disquiet.
‘But surely you suspected?’ I said. I even felt a little irritated, I remember. ‘I mean, this house … the way we talk to each other …’
‘No, it never occurred to me. Lots of young men share houses. It never occurred to me.’ She didn’t sound bewildered, just thoughtful.
‘But surely … I mean, on television, Number 96, the soapies, the films … you can hardly avoid the subject nowadays. It must at least have popped into your mind as a possibility.’
‘No, it didn’t,’ she said firmly, ‘that’s on television. It’s never happened before in our family.’ Now, it’s a large family, Yvonne is one of seven brothers and sisters, they all have several children, some of the children have children, there are dozens and dozens of in-laws … I didn’t want to have an argument, but I didn’t want to be left appearing the family freak, either.
‘Well, I think you’d find,’ I said, treading as delicately as I could, ‘that at some point somewhere along the line someone had at least given it a go.’
‘It’s funny you should say that,’ she said, with an edge to her voice, ‘because I always did wonder about …’ (naming here a relative I couldn’t place). And we both laughed. So far so good.
It’s amazing, isn’t it, how easily, how generously a mother can shift her focus in seconds from decades of social conditioning, religious teaching, media clichés and family dogma to focus on one question: is my child happy? It had happened to me once before. Some time after my marriage had broken up and I’d begun to explore the possibilities of emotional and sexual satisfaction with men, I thought I’d better tell my mother-in-law. I wanted to tell her. She was at that time still the only mother figure in my life and I wanted her understanding. She was slicing carrots for dinner one evening in the kitchen of the vicarage in South Yarra. As she sliced, I told her I thought I preferred men sexually. She too came up with some version of ‘I see’ and kept slicing. Nothing changed. I didn’t sense as much as a hiccup in the flow of her affection or attachment. As a vicar’s wife she couldn’t have been expected to give me her blessing or approval, nor was I looking for either. I wanted a sign that she didn’t think any less of me. And she gave it to me. There was no anguished discussion, no raking over the marriage with her daughter, no sermon, just an unbroken flow of the feelings that had been there before I’d spoken. It’s miraculous, really.
Whether Jean would have felt so at peace with my preference is hard to say. I fear she may have felt she’d failed in the mothering rôle entrusted to her. Acutely conscious of what was said in certain library books about sons who were strongly attached to older mothers, she constantly seemed to be monitoring my progress through adolescence for signs of deviance from some norm. Part of her found joy in what she called my ‘sensitivity’ (although she warned me I’d ‘suffer for it’) and was appalled by some drawings of mine she stumbled across in the margins of an old Daily Telegraph of naked, heavy-breasted women. But another part of her, I’m sure, prayed it would all turn out all right—that the adoption would be seen as a success.
For all Yvonne’s generosity of spirit, I was aware as I sat with her on the balcony that sweltering afternoon that she still had fears and anxieties that required my understanding. One anxiety might be that by letting me be adopted she had left me in moral danger or had caused me some emotional damage resulting in sexual damage—I didn’t know her well enough to be sure. So slowly, over an hour or so, I started to explain two things: firstly, that I didn’t feel ‘damaged’ in any way—on the contrary, I felt remarkably whole—and, secondly, that she should not feel remotely responsible for who I’d turned out to be. I’m not sure she’s ever quite believed me on either count. Nor am I sure any more it’s as simple as I made it sound. But different occasions have their own truths. And as she left the house towards the end of the afternoon to walk down the hill to the ferry, she stepped up to Peter and gave him a kiss. To you it may have looked like any other kiss. To me it was momentous.
One of the things I said to Yvonne that day which I now have doubts about is that I had chosen to live as a homosexual. It’s not exactly the wrong word, I now think, but it’s a word which inadequately describes what happens. Only the most single-minded rebel against the phallocracy, surely, would choose (in the ordinary meaning of ‘I think I’ll take that one’) to be a homosexual. At the end of the twentieth century, however, it’s become important that people see themselves as authentic constructions, see self, not as a God-given essence, but as the point of intersection of a variety of discourses (conversations going on in society and in your head about who you properly are or should or could be). Freedom, if it means anything, seems to be about choosing intelligently between discourses, questioning commands, interrogating clichéd propositions and making sure what intersects is what you want to intersect. You learn to distinguish between liberating and oppressive discourses. Many of these discourses are rooted in language, naturally enough—‘good children love their parents’, for example—and so the greater your linguistic sophistication, the greater your ability to interrogate dubious propositions and to ask what ‘good’ might mean in this case, for instance, or ‘love’, not to mention ‘parents’.
Other, less malleable ideas about what the self might be are scarcely entertained just at the moment by those in the know in my sorts of circles. Some highly educated people, particularly in the humanities, who have no problem with innate gender differences in their own dogs or parrots and seem happy about cows behaving like cows and bulls like bulls (thanks to genetic engineering) jack up when the conversation turns to human animals, animals that use language and plan and dream. It’s not as a rule that they deny that biology plays a part in the functioning of all human organs, including the brain, it’s just that if you
admit that biology plays a major (sometimes any) role in determining who we are as individuals the social engineers amongst us start to lose their sense of power. The idea that the world is all ‘text’ and you have a leading rôle in writing it is obviously appealing. And while the proposition that you are a linguistic genius for biological reasons is not particularly threatening to anyone, and even the ideological hard-liner with a linguistically gifted child might let it pass unchallenged, the proposition that for much the same reasons you are a homosexual is widely resisted. Some cultural materialists, cocooned in a silky web of social control fantasies, even deny that there was such a thing as homosexuality before the term was coined in the late nineteenth century. And, of course, they’re right, there wasn’t. But there was something we’d now call homosexuality long before the term was coined—men preferring sex with other men, women desiring mainly or only women—just as there were koalas before anyone called them koalas.
So why do so many intellectuals of my generation resist the notion that homosexuality, say, as opposed to nose-length or glaucoma may be genetically determined? After all, can there be anything as likely to be genetically determined as sexuality? The usual answer that’s given is that the ‘world as text’ view, in which even AIDS becomes a metaphor for something else, gives us freedom to change our world. Biology is so fixed, it takes away the possibility of choice. I don’t really buy that argument. For a start, biology is dangerously unfixed and the possibility of choice increases almost daily. No, I think the cultural materialist’s rejection of biology comes down to a desire to salvage something from Marxism, from that nineteenth-century dream of a socially engineered, just society. It also comes, I think, from the conviction amongst the language-based professionals—historians and English Literature lecturers in particular—that if they play their cards right they can dictate the text. They’re simply not equipped to dictate biology. I think it’s about power and power’s considerable rewards.
I was a staunch believer in the world-as-text approach from about the mid-sixties, when I first encountered Bakhtin and the structuralists, until quite recently. For almost twenty years. Even in my metaphysical musings, ‘in the beginning was the Word’ invited multiple readings. God created by ‘saying’, by naming, and in the maya world of illusion, Adam (human consciousness) created by renaming. After meeting Yvonne, though, and watching the way she sits and walks, listening to her talk and tell jokes, looking at photographs of my half-brother (he even stands like me) and thinking back over my life in order to be able to explain it to her, I find it an unconvincing view of human nature and who we are—beautiful and ripe for exploitation by people like me, but at best only part of the picture. Social forces may largely determine the form a preference for one’s own sex takes, but I now doubt that it always produces it in the first place.
Like almost every gay male I’ve read or heard talk on the subject, I was aware from earliest childhood of an attraction to males which excited my genitals. It happened at such an early age—I can still remember dreaming clammy dreams at five or six about the man next door, desiring genital contact—that I find it hard to understand except in terms of some innate disposition. Perhaps it’s a disposition everyone has but most are socialised out of dwelling on or developing. But in conversation most gay males I’ve heard speak about it do so in order to emphasise the point that ‘that’s the way I was from the start’. To quote the historian Garry Wotherspoon, ‘my homoerotic interests were a given for me’, although I doubt he would approve of the use I’m making of his declaration.
From a very early age—certainly under six—I was aware of being different, although I hardly knew from what. I knew that the cards I’d been dealt (by circumstance, biology, whatever agency) made up an odd hand. You notice at school that you speak differently (and differently from your parents), you notice you speak just a little too well. (‘Are you English, son?’ one teacher asked me in fourth class and it wasn’t a friendly question, despite the maps of the British Empire on the classroom wall. It was an invitation to climb down a peg or two.) You notice in yourself a certain fastidiousness that discomforts people, an attention to dress, as it used to be phrased, that isn’t quite … what? You notice other boys don’t mind tearing their clothes off in the changing-sheds and knocking each other about (but you do), other boys enjoy winning things—matches, races, card-games, anything (you don’t much), other boys think smacking a cricket-ball around an oval is fun (you find it boring and pointless). Above all, you notice other boys like being with other boys. You basically like being with girls.
Although none of us could have quite put our finger on it at the time, Jean and Tom must have noticed I was not growing up to be a real man. They sent me to Scouts on Friday nights, they made me go to tennis lessons on Saturday mornings, they encouraged me to make friends with other little boys and inspect their model trains and cicada collections, they gave me all the building blocks they could to make a real man of me, but I didn’t build anything with them. Tom, strangely (the pub owner’s son, merchant seaman, radio operator and, in his old age, messenger boy for an advertising company) didn’t seem much concerned.
As I got older and drifted off into my various Pure Lands, my failure to connect with normal boyhood became more marked, although I don’t remember being bullied or made to suffer for it. Nowadays I read all these memoirs about how other little boys went fishing with their fathers, killed things, pulled little girls’ (and little boys’) knickers down behind sheds in hot backyards, and later got drunk on Saturday nights with their mates from the football club and cruised around Kings Cross leering at prostitutes. I didn’t do any of that. I did get infatuated with dreamy girls from private schools at dancing classes at the local Masonic Hall (I excelled at the cha-cha, possibly for genetic reasons) but on the whole I had far more important, more thrilling things on my mind (I thought) than pulling down girls’ knickers or getting drunk. I would wander the streets after school or on a Saturday afternoon talking to myself or the dog in my secret language, literally reinterpreting the universe, making up a medieval history for my Shambhala, trying to work out what it meant to say that God was both All and also spirit, or thinking about Communism, Hungary, Tibet, who Jesus was, rehearsing conversations with real and imaginary friends, making up far-fetched, dangerous stories about my origins—I was swimming in an ocean of words in several languages. I knew this was strange, I knew that even at Sunday School the other boys were different and thought a lot about girls and cars and cricket and having a good time, but I was only vaguely aware that the way I was had sexual implications. I didn’t know you had to be one thing or the other (a notion some gay activists, paradoxically, have energetically reaffirmed, with excellent results in terms of their own career prospects).
The first time these implications were spelt out to me—the first time I realised my difference disgusted people—was in college in Canberra. I was eighteen. It was my first year away from home. One night in early winter at about ten o’clock I left my room to take a walk around the grounds and breathe in a bit of frosty air. I always read in the evenings, I never, needless to say, played billiards or went off in a group to the pub. I’d hardly gone two yards down the darkened corridor when I heard my name mentioned behind a closed door opposite. I stopped to listen. Some beery, smoky gathering of the boys. ‘What a bloody poof he is!’ I went cold. ‘Yeah, let’s teach the little queer a lesson!’ ‘D’you know what he did the other day? He was behind me in the queue in the servery and he bumped his tray up against mine like this—bump! bump! I got the message. Little shit!’ I was starting to feel nauseated and leant against the wall by the door. ‘Yeah, let’s teach him a lesson. Let’s take him out into the bush, rip his clothes off and leave him there. Fucking poof.’
I went back to my room in a sick daze. I was trembling with the shock of it. I locked the door and lay down on my bed and simply wept. (Which is what you’d expect a queer to do, after all.) What distressed me wasn’t just the sickeni
ng thought that these boys I said hullo to as we passed on the footpath or sat next to at a table took it I was homosexual and desired them (I wasn’t and didn’t), it was as much as anything the violent hatred. Why did they hate me so much? I wasn’t in any state to reflect on the irony of a group of young men choosing to sit around together discussing another male’s sexuality and fantasising about stripping him naked and sexually degrading him.
My solution was a Christian one: stare out the evil until it retreats, kill it with kindness. I’d heard the boy who lived in that room say he always had trouble waking up in the morning, his alarm-clock having no effect, so the next day I said to him that, if he liked, I’d wake him every morning on the way to breakfast. And he agreed. And I did it for the rest of the term. Curious, isn’t it? And the only open sexual harassment I experienced that year was from the father of one of the boys in the room that night. He chased me around the table in his professorial office three times in an ungainly effort to press his suit.
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