Mother's Disgrace

by Robert Dessaix

  What I didn’t understand in those days, the early ’sixties, was that in any society ideas about what constitutes masculinity and what constitutes femininity are rigidly fixed and the boundary between them is jealously guarded. It’s a binary system and one that confers power. The economic and political structure, and the rewards system in particular, are based on those ideas, making any movement in them dangerous. Sometimes you might go to a country where masculinity and femininity are defined differently—to Turkey, say, or Russia—and at first it seems liberating and exciting. So it is possible to be a man, after all, and hold hands with your best friend, so it is possible to be a man and love poetry, talk about God and death instead of cars, drink no alcohol, go to art galleries with your friends on Saturday afternoons instead of football matches … Then it dawns on you that the lines between real men and real women are just as rigidly drawn in Turkey and Russia as they are at home, and are just as jealously guarded (perhaps more so), they’re just drawn in a different place.

  Here in Australia until quite recently you were either masculine or you were feminine. It was a package deal. A man looked hard-edged—rough-hewn, perhaps, but hard-edged—haircut, forehead, nose, chin, chest … Lower down certain allowances were made (a soft belly was a sign of other manly activities, after all), but the public parts of the anatomy should be sharp. A man was emotionally and linguistically restrained, not given to talking about his feelings, except in orgiastic outbursts, which made alcohol every true man’s accessory, although he could talk about his health at a fairly crude physical level—‘I feel crook’, ‘I feel great’ and so on. A man was attuned to physical sensations rather than to sensitivities (the smell and sounds of the garden or bush, the taste of good food, sexual sensations—but not to describing them too well); he was physically hard-working (he built, he cleared, he rode, he laboured—he was not a dainty clerk or a librarian); he dominated nature by thrusting into it, killing things, turning forest into farmland, building cities, laying railway tracks, flying planes, dousing fires, steering ships across oceans—he didn’t decorate, write commentaries, embroider or colour in; he didn’t keep clean and tidy except on active combat duty, preferring to clean up massively once a month; and he was a realist, engaging with the world face to face, calling a spade a spade, laying it on the line—he had no patience with metaphysics, fictions, poetic transformations, ironic transgressions—with art, in other words. And in each of these categories I failed the test. I felt, I talked, I mooned, I wrote, I embroidered, I tidied away, I lived in a meta-universe. The real thing was grist to my transforming mill.

  I expect the boys in college that night had seen all this, as I had not, and put two and two together and concluded I was, in Australian terms, a girl. And so doubly disgusting: to be reviled both as a girl and as a boy who chose to be a girl. I was therefore, on both counts, fit to be violated.

  Few of us, I think, are unsinning in this regard, if a little less crudely than the boys in that room that night. How easy it is to catch yourself thinking there’s something slightly effeminate (‘poofy’) about long-haired men, say, who fight against the domination of nature by other men, who carry on about rain forests and use natural healing methods. How easy it is to jump to conclusions about the sexuality of a man who prefers going to the ballet or reading a novel to fixing the car or even tinkering in the shed. There’s always a small suspicion in the back of the mind about a man who chooses his words too carefully, who plays with ironies or cadences, who too readily finds the precise word to express his feelings about a friend or a painting. It used to be called ‘ambiguity’, such a man was ‘ambiguous’—and indeed he was, because the signals he sent out could be read in two ways.

  On that May night in college in 1962, however, I was not equipped to consider these questions quite as rationally. I didn’t see myself as a queer, a poof, a homosexual, a non-man. What I said to myself was that basically I liked spending my time with girls, talking with them, going out with them, dancing with them, touching them, kissing them, not realising that this in itself was a mark against me. Girls were for wooing, penetrating and marrying, not for merging with; perhaps when you were old and married it didn’t matter so much any more, but not when you were young, sharp as a blade, honed to action and to carving out a space in the world.

  At the same time I was forced that night to confront and interpret the fact that although I was emotionally bound up with many women, I was drawn to maleness as well and found it sexually exciting at times. I was drawn to it in a fugitive, dreamlike way, almost as if I caught myself listening in sometimes to someone else’s whispers.

  Man as knife, that was the nub of it. I even remember when still a boy finding the Russian word for the dagger wild Circassian tribesmen used erotic. Kinzhal. Keen Zhal. Zhalo: a sting, a prick, the point of a needle. There was a vengeful kinzhal in every Romantic tale of lust and derring-do I read—Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy. They were slipped in, plunged in, twisted in, the victim writhed and groaned and then there was bloody silence. I was not knife-like. Only my tongue was sharp-edged and that, although I didn’t know it, was a woman’s attribute.

  But I saw knives on buses, on the screen, in the schoolyard, behind shop counters, collecting fares. I saw them and felt drawn to their hard edges, but only hazily. I had very little idea of what taking one of these knives into myself might mean. Looking at one across an aisle or a shop-counter (and I was not always as furtive about that as I should have been), I wished more that I could bring that cutting edge out in myself. Perhaps then I, too, could learn to hack, clear, cut, plunge and jab.

  Not that I was a roly-poly beach-ball of a child with a puddingy face and a Cupid’s penis. Not at all. I had some knife-like possibilities, but I was small. More your butter-knife with a fine bone handle than your Oriental dagger. Small and slightly woppish. ‘Stand up, Jones, and show the class what “sallow” means,’ said Mr L. when I was in fifth class. I stood up and thought of myself as displeasingly sallow for the next twenty years. No one ever asked me to demonstrate what ‘olive-skinned’ meant.

  Of course, a smooth olive skin, strong cheek-bones and thinnish body (good calves) appealed to some. I couldn’t help noticing. But until I started reading André Gide I was very unclear about what this appeal might lead to. My mother had warned me specifically about those men on park benches wearing socks with sandals. She’d said nothing, however, about Latin masters who asked me home after school for private lessons with knee-squeezing thrown in, or about smartly dressed men with account addresses in Double Bay and Vaucluse—customers in the bookshop in Castlereagh Street—who wondered what time I finished work and if I’d like to ‘do something’ when the shop closed. She’d said not a word about boys in football jerseys at bus-stops blowing gum-bubbles who asked me where I lived and if I had a girlfriend and what time my mother got home. Most particularly, she hadn’t warned me to be on the lookout for the blatant approach of the three young men I helped with maps one sultry afternoon in the bookstore. It must have been about 1960. They were blades, in body-hugging T-shirts, strong legs in rough material, dirty boots. They were off across the Nullarbor to Perth. A bit of horseplay over the maps. Gary was the clown, the lair. ‘Hey, Rod,’ he said, jabbing a thumb half over his shoulder at me, ‘ya wannim?’ Rod lowered the map of the Nullarbor and looked me over from head to foot. He scratched at his crotch, raised the map and said: ‘Nah, too small.’ I was mildly disappointed, I think, as much as affronted or disgusted. Not that I’d have gone off with Rod even if he’d given me the nod—there was no place for that in any of my scripts. If anything, I was intrigued that such people could exist: young men in T-shirts, manly young men who drove cars across the Nullarbor, not Classics masters or grubby, confused boys in the backs of buses, but ordinary young men who apparently had sex with other ordinary young men, perhaps even their ordinary mates, yet weren’t riven or anguished or furtive or freakish. They’d made a mistake, needless to say, in thinking I might be available to joi
n in such activities—I wasn’t and never would be available—but it was intriguing nonetheless.

  In none of my Pure Lands was there any place for a homosexual. In my God-is-All world neither God nor His infinite manifestation was sexual at all (there being neither male nor female in the Christian heaven—that is, in the consciousness of absolute reality) and if in the human dream about God and His manifestation there were finite bodies with sexual urges, this was best dealt with through a loving, companionate uniting of the male and female. I didn’t see in those days how those butter-soft words surreptitiously underpinned a whole political and economic structure (socialist, capitalist, it didn’t matter, it was everywhere the same). Nor did homosexuals appear in the streets of my other Pure Land, my Shambhala—not in the bohemian quarter of the city of K., in the monasteries, on the farms, in the shops or hotels or theatres—it was almost as if I instinctively knew that if men are to rule (as they naturally did there), they must establish what makes a man a man and jealously define and guard the difference. Queen Victorias in mauve suits, like Mr J. in Hardback Fiction, were no threat to the line, nor were simpering, knee-squeezing Latin masters waxing lyrical about Virgil, nor were greasy adolescents, poking about inside their flies, or softly spoken book-readers, for that matter, with tasteful flats in Double Bay and a penchant for French art films. They were all clowns, Black and White Minstrels, parodying the Other, highlighting the division between masculine and feminine; indeed, in some ways probably entrenching it.

  In Russia, my other Land, homosexuals simply didn’t exist. They were painted over, married off, enveloped in silence. Russia was the land of realist fictions, after all, which thrives on heterosexual arrangements—they produce such marvellously continuous narratives. In Russian fiction by and large men acted and women were acted upon: thesis, antithesis, synthesis/thesis, antithesis, synthesis, all pleasingly dialectical. Well, there were some strong women in Russian fiction: in Turgenev’s Rudin, for example, and in his Fathers and Sons, in War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, even Chekhov’s plays. On the whole, however, the women’s strength was severely virginal, needing fertilisation by a male in order to produce anything of value, even if the male in question proved hopeless at doing anything at all. Or else their strength was nothing more than a destructive excess of sexual energy. Pushkin’s Tatyana in Eugene Onegin showed a bit of initiative, it’s true—she wrote to Onegin and scandalously declared her love, and later as an unhappily married woman she refused an affair with him, which showed some kind of strength of character—but she was scarcely a feminist heroine. At the symbolic level, particularly, Russia in my day was the land of gigantic statues of bronze heroes thrusting forwards, the land of generals and marshals and gangs of muscled workmen damming rivers and pushing through the trackless taiga.

  All the same, in real life and even in art from time to time, Russian men could be disconcertingly unknife-like. Masculinity in Russia seemed to allow for things it didn’t allow for in Australia. It seemed to allow for sentimentality, for example, for a love of language and poetry and painting, for strong emotional attachments to other men, for a certain physical flabbiness, for laziness and lying about. Things that made men ambiguous in our society didn’t seem to make them ambiguous in Russia. A man might be ‘womanish’ in some regard—he might drift about in a reverie, for example, talking too much and too self-consciously well, he might dress with too much care for the effect, or show more interest in courtship and romance than in actually having sex—without showing any interest at all in sexual relations with other men. I heard jokes about the men who loitered in the park in front of the Bolshoi Theatre and jokes about Tchaikovsky, a smutty story or two about Pushkin (a skirt-chaser if ever there was one) and a rumour about Gogol, but by and large in Russia, at least in my time, even amongst my actor friends, men were men and women were women and there was no confusion in their minds about the difference. Sex lined up pretty well with gender. Not a single officially published novel, poem, short story or play, not a film on any screen, not an article in any newspaper, no history text, no limerick, no biography, no radio interview ever mentioned homosexuality.

  In conversation, on the rare occasions it came up, it was exoticised, as it was in Australia until quite recently. It was said to flourish in the Caucasus, for example, and in Central Asia, both ‘illicit zones’ in the Russian imagination. ‘In Yerevan,’ my swarthy Armenian neighbour Vil once said to me after one cognac too many, ‘if my friend and I see a cute couple necking in the park, I’ll say to him: “Tell you what: I’ll take the girl and you can take the boy.’” Raucous laughter. I didn’t react. I think the Foreign Department had asked him to feel me out. (‘Vil’, by the way, stood for ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’—they chose our neighbours for us very carefully at Moscow University. I wonder if he’s changed his name.) Homosexuality was also a foreign condition, meaning Western, bred in the fetid atmosphere of late capitalism, and it was of some interest to the KGB who thought they could exploit it to their own purposes. One of my fellow students that first year, on exchange from London University, was photographed by the KGB in bed with another male. They thought they could blackmail him by threatening to send copies to his parents in England. He simply asked for additional copies for himself and his friends. The KGB never understood the ’sixties. Nor, as I’ve said, did I.

  The only friend I made at Moscow University with any real awareness of deviant sexuality was an Estonian student I’ll call Arvo. We met when I was on telephone duty on our floor of the student hostel. I was sitting at the telephone desk, taking calls and buzzing students to come to the phone, and between calls Arvo engaged me in the kind of conversation only Balts seemed to know how to make. Despite over two decades of Soviet Communism and energetic Russian colonisation, Estonians in particular always seemed to me utterly unaffected, completely ‘Western’ in their thinking—Hanseatic, Scandinavian, Germanic, anything but Soviet. It was like talking to a well-read, highly educated young man from Berlin or Stockholm. He could sense who I was, he could read my signals in a way most Russians could not. He was modern—Russians seemed so stuck somewhere in the 1890s, pre-Freud, pre-Jung, pre-twentieth century. Not gay, but queer. Married, naturally, with a child. A cultural historian, knowledgeable about Islam. Apart from a frisson or two, no sexual relationship developed from that first conversation by the telephone desk, but a lifelong friendship did, with many visits to Tallinn and an affection, if not a deeply informed one, for Estonian fiction, poetry and painting. I’ve always liked little countries, you see—perhaps I hear echoes in them of my own Shambhala. Iceland, Estonia, Lithuania, Andorra, Ecuador—you can take them in whole and know them intimately, as loved narratives.

  I actually had a strong attachment that first year in Russia to one of my classmates, a girl called Natasha. I don’t think Arvo quite approved of it. The KGB made no obvious objections, which is probably one of the reasons Arvo didn’t quite approve of it. I’m not sure, looking back, how passionate it was on my part, but as the year progressed I sought out her company more and more, or she mine, even spending the occasional night at her flat or one of her friends’. We courted in the way couples did in Russian textbooks of the period, in the exercises on declensions and verb endings: ‘Natasha, would you like to go to the cinema?’ ‘Yes, I would. There’s a very good film on at the Kosmos. Would you like to see it?’ Or: ‘Let’s invite some friends to dinner at my place. I have some meat, some cucumber and some potatoes.’ ‘Good. I’ll buy some ice-cream. Then we can play some music and dance.’ In accordance with this rather stilted script we went to the opera and the ballet, to fine restaurants and snack-bars, to apartment blocks all over Moscow visiting friends, and because Natasha was reasonably ‘well-connected’, she brooked no argument from the kind of people whose full-time job it was in those days to keep the general public at bay—to stop theatre-lovers seeing plays, book-lovers buying books, travellers buying tickets and diners forcing their way into half-full restaurants and eating
the food the staff was selling at black market prices out the back door, and so on. Natasha could get into a restaurant that was literally barricaded against the public like a medieval fortress. Within half an hour we would be ensconced inside eating our cabbage soup. For people of Natasha’s class a deficit economy had definite social advantages. It was a source of power and privilege, and I’m not surprised that many of them want it back.

  For the serious courting couple sleeping together at the hostel could be a risky business, not to mention the discomfort of single beds. You have to understand that half the country wanted to live in Moscow, the seat of power in a highly centralised state, where the standard of living was comparatively high, but to live in Moscow you needed a residence permit and that was almost impossible to obtain, unless you had a job in Moscow or were born there or had married a Muscovite. That’s why you saw forty-year-old actresses playing the Three Sisters in repertory at the Moscow Arts Theatre—they had their job and their flat in Moscow and they weren’t going to move to Omsk or Tomsk or Irkutsk for anything in the world. Integrity is not a Russian concept; they make do with honesty. So massive sweeps were occasionally arranged without warning of the entire eighteen storeys of the student hostel to clean out illicit residents. Not only was the building sealed off from top to bottom by squads of young Party activists, the various zones or sections were also individually sealed off, as was each floor. The lifts were stopped and the staircases were locked. Then the room-by-room search began. By the end of the night on one occasion in 1967 some 1,600 illegal residents had been found and sent packing—grandmothers up from the country, packs of children, nephews, cousins, wives from Vladivostok, old school friends moonlighting on some building site. By the early hours of the morning the population of a large village found itself standing outside in the frost looking back at the illuminated Stalinist wedding-cake soaring up into the sky, a forbidden zone. So there were restrictions on courting and a lot of it took place amongst the marble columns of the underground stations.