Holding the Man

by Timothy Conigrave

  Those three years were also about Craig. He was a northern-beaches surfie with a barrel chest and icy-blue eyes that never quite looked straight at you. He was probably aware of their power. When he looked at me I felt he could read my soul. He was straight and had a girlfriend. He knew I was gay but it didn’t worry him. I never made a pass at him but I manoeuvred things so we’d sit together or have lunch together. I had always had a fantasy of friendship with a straight man, where we shared our deepest secrets. But my attempts at intimate discussions with Craig invariably failed.

  ‘When did you lose your virginity?’

  ‘Why do you need to know that?’

  The ache of unrequited love appeared again. I started to wonder if this was an addiction, if I was like the women who always fell for married men. Watching Brideshead Revisited I was haunted by the eccentric homosexual Sebastian and his crush on his heterosexual friend Charles. I thought their relationship was like mine and Craig’s, but when I asked him if he thought so he didn’t know what I meant. I didn’t have the guts to explain.

  It was never going to be anything but a friendship. I did the only thing I could do. I took him home in my head and made him a part of my nocturnal fantasies.

  Those years were about being perceived as soft. On our first day we had sat in the steamy confines of the NIDA theatre listening to welcome speeches from the staff. The administrator told us about the industry week the school had run at the end of the previous year. There had been a panel of casting agents and the students had had a go at doing screen tests. ‘Barry, your movement teacher, gave a demonstration showing the girls how to be feminine and boys to walk like men, and not like they were carrying a handbag.’ My God, what have I got myself into?

  Fortunately my year was brimming with gays and lesbians. We managed to find each other very quickly. Nicholas asked me outright if I had a boyfriend, then told me that he thought he was gay. Libby always talked about her ‘friend’ Dotty, and told me that Veronica, the spunk of the year, was also gay.

  One night Craig and Paul – another guy in my year – and I were checking our pimples in the mirror when Paul said he had heard that Veronica was gay. Craig pulled a face of derision. ‘You poofters think everyone is gay.’ Paul and I smiled at each other. It turned out that there were eight of us who were gay or bisexual, a third of the year.

  At the end of first term we did a student cabaret, where we could do anything we chose. My group did the seven deadly sins. I was Vanity and elected to play him in Berlin white-face, lying across the top of a piano admiring himself in a hand-mirror.

  After this performance Barry asked me to his place for dinner and a little chat.

  ‘I’ve given this talk a number of times over the years, and with good results. It’s about gesture, carriage and tone of voice. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that effeminate actors don’t get much work. The public want their leading men to be masculine. If they detect any softness they’re not going to believe that this man really wants this woman. You’re a handsome young man, reasonably well built, and yet that all falls away when your gestures are affected. Look at the way you’re sitting now.’ I was leaning on one elbow, my index finger against my cheek and the other fingers rolled into a fist. ‘It’s a very womanly way to sit. Understand?’ I nodded. ‘You are more than your sexuality and I’m sure that when you’re at home by yourself you’re not like this.’

  I knew what he was talking about, I’d known it for some time. But Barry was a gay man, a member of the cardigan set, and here he was asking me to betray my sexuality. It went against all the politics I had learnt at uni.

  I began to explore my sexuality. It started in the bars. I had never walked up to a stranger and started a conversation and was sure I’d look like a real dick if I did. So I would sit on my been watching the passing trade, wondering what it would be like to bonk with them, hoping that if someone tried to pick me up I’d like them. But nobody did, probably because I looked like a depressed desperate.

  It continued at student parties. At one party Paul – who had strawberry-blond hair and pale blue eyes and always wore pastel colours, so that he looked like a watercolour – was stretched out on the couch looking edible. Feeling game after a few beers I lay down next to him. ‘I really like you, Paul.’ I kissed his ear gently.

  ‘Thanks, but I’d rather not.’ He sat up. ‘I don’t think you like me as much as I like you.’

  A few weekends later, after I had convinced him that I liked him, we fell into bed. Paul and I started going out, but it wasn’t long before he complained that I wasn’t affectionate enough and that I never wanted sex. I was finding our sex difficult. I would always come before Paul – I would try to help him but it was hard when all I wanted to do was sleep.

  The more Paul complained, the more I backed off, until he angrily confronted me under the fig trees at NIDA. ‘It’s obvious that you have no commitment to this relationship and yet you don’t have the guts to break it off. So I am going to.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I feel used.’ Then he walked away. I felt like shit.

  At a barbecue later in the year, to the sensual sounds of Grace Jones, I made eye contact with a guy from the year above, a beautiful blond named Brett. I had heard that he and his lover had recently broken up. I offered him a lift home. Sitting in the front seat he said he needed to piss, so we stopped at my place. I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on so that he might stick around.

  When I opened the fridge he spotted a bottle of amyl. ‘May I?’

  ‘Sure.’ He took a snort and handed me the bottle. My heart started to race, thumping away in my chest. ‘You should feel my heart,’ I said.

  ‘You should feel this.’ He pointed to his crutch. I asked him to stay. ‘We should stay at my place,’ he said, ‘because Sam is calling me from Chicago first thing in the morning.’

  ‘I thought you two had broken up.’

  Brett seemed surprised. ‘Who told you that?’ I couldn’t remember. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking.

  When we were in his bedroom undressing I was so desperate to impress him that I lost my erection. ‘It’s all right, we don’t have to do anything. Let’s just go to sleep.’ We curled up in the bed. It was then that I cracked a fat. I placed it on his thigh and we started to play. There was something about the sex that felt young, the sort of sex that I’d had as a schoolboy.

  The next morning I had to leave early for rehearsal. I said goodbye to the blond angel in the bed, but I wanted to continue the contact. I wrote him notes and left messages on his machine. Absolute silence. It was confusing and painful. Is it something I’ve done? Eventually I confronted him at the end-of-term drinks. ‘Just because we had sex doesn’t mean you can treat me like shit. The way you’ve ignored me is hurtful.’

  Brett was obviously uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry you’re upset but I was looking for a one-night stand. I’ve already got a relationship.’ At least I knew it wasn’t about me.

  Then I met Greg, an artist who had survived a severe head injury. The doctors had replaced part of his skull with a metal plate which you could push in. We met at a party at his house in Melbourne during the Christmas break. As the last of the guests were being bid farewell at the front door, I started to follow them out. He took my hand, led me to his bedroom and began to undress me. There was something horny about his speed. I was in the hands of an expert.

  Greg and I continued to see each other. He would take me to expensive restaurants and the theatre and then back to his place to romp. One night over dinner I said to him, ‘Darling, you’ve chipped your front tooth.’

  ‘I dropped them in the sink last night.’ He pushed them out with his tongue, both sets. A shiver raced up my spine.

  ‘I can’t believe I’ve been going out with you for two weeks and I never knew.’

  ‘Just wait till we get home and I’ll give you a gum job.’ Another shiver went up my spine.

  We never got round to the gum job. He sat on my cock and I fucked h
im until we both came. Greg jumped off me, grabbed a towel to wipe the come and started rubbing my genitals furiously. I didn’t realise what he was doing until I got home and saw my undies stained with shit. I felt a wave of disgust. Such a thing had never happened to me before and it revived my fears of anal sex as something dirty, practised only by unnatural dirty homos.

  One day during that vacation Brenton Lewis came to lunch at my parents’ house. He had recently left the Jesuits because he’d been assigned to look after dying priests. He believed this was punishment for having worked with a non-Catholic organisation – the Salvation Army – to set up a youth refuge.

  He asked me how I was getting on. ‘NIDA’s been lots of fun but I seem to be having problems with relationships. I’ve had some fairly awful experiences.’

  He asked if I’d like to come and chat during the week. When I saw him I talked about feeling inadequate, inexperienced and immature. I mentioned my fascination with the idea of saunas, how I felt tempted to go but frightened of doing so.

  ‘While you haven’t experienced it, it will have power over you.’

  I decided I had to confront my fear. I rang a friend of mine who went to saunas quite a lot and asked him to accompany me. We put our clothes into lockers and wrapped small towels around our waist. My friend gave me a tour, then left me. I sat in the steam-room. Through the cloud of steam appeared a very muscular man. He sat next to me and rubbed his thigh against mine. I had an instant erection which he could see sticking out from under my towel. He followed me out of the steam-room and into a cubicle, where he grabbed me, kissed me and pushed my head down onto his cock. He said he wanted me to screw him. We lay on a squeaky vinyl bed and I lost my erection. He tried to turn me on by sucking me but it wasn’t going to happen. Then he tried to screw me. I didn’t really want him inside me, so my arse was shut tight. I had to work at relaxing so he wouldn’t hurt me. There I was being fucked by a body-builder, having no erection and feeling like a semen receptacle.

  After coming, he held me and said, ‘There’s nothing like being held in a man’s arms after a hard day at work.’ All I felt was the desire to get out of there.

  ‘It felt so impersonal,’ I explained to Brenton. ‘I felt used. Another disaster.’

  ‘It’s obviously not what you’re looking for. So what do you think you are looking for?’

  I thought about his question. ‘Someone to hold, to love and care for, and who loves me.’

  ‘Have you ever been in love?’ I nodded. ‘With John?’ I nodded. ‘Do you still love him?’

  I knew my answer instantly but was nervous about saying it. ‘Yeah, I still love him.’

  ‘So what’s your problem?’

  He was right. All the things I really wanted were there in John. Okay, maybe not wild sex but I hadn’t been having great success with that anyway.

  I rang John, told him I was going to see my Grandma in Adelaide and asked if he would like to come. He said he would and the next day we loaded up his car and headed off.

  The drive was like a dream, listening to Shabooh Shabah by INXS under a hot glary sun, driving through the Coorong with its pink sand and pelicans and virtually not a car to be seen. John and I were relaxed, cracking funnies all the way and laughing. When he complained about the car not having airconditioning, I used my coffee cup to scoop air inside. John laughed hard, a laugh I hadn’t heard for some time.

  I told John what Brenton had said. ‘I love you, John, and I would like to us to get back together, if you’ll have me back.’

  His answer was understated. ‘Good.’ But I could tell he was happy. I think it was during this drive that I really fell in love with John.

  In Adelaide we stayed with a friend of John’s from college named Roger. Roger had been at the beat on the River Torrens when Professor Duncan was allegedly bashed by cops and thrown into the river, where he drowned. The cops were acquitted but Roger said angrily, ‘I know what I saw.’

  Visiting Grandma was a little tense. Many years before, Dad had asked me not to tell her I was gay. ‘It would kill her.’ Now it saddened me to introduce the man I loved as a schoolmate. I wanted her blessing. However, she was so welcoming to John that I thought she might have picked up on the truth. When she died a year later, I regretted that my grandmother never really knew me.

  We returned to Melbourne. I was due back at NIDA. John and I agreed that when we had both graduated we would try living together, but while we were apart we could have sex outside the relationship.

  I took it a little further than that. When I was in third year I had a relationship with Harvey, a big boy who looked a bit like Matt Dillon. He knew about John but probably hoped I would leave John for him. We spent a weekend in a holiday house on the south coast, and on the Sunday morning I found myself avoiding his sexual advances.

  ‘There’s something I want to talk about.’ I took a deep breath. ‘I’m not really happy at the moment. I’m wondering whether it would be better for us to –’

  ‘Break up?’ Harvey flew into a rage. ‘Get your things. We’re going home.’ It was the worst car trip of my life. Harvey refused to talk to me, refused to answer my questions; he just drove. It confirmed one of the reasons for my unhappiness. He was intense and quick to anger.

  A couple of days later Harvey told me that he felt used, that I was merely amusing myself while I waited to get back with John. Deep down I felt he was probably right.

  Those three years were also about a strange new disease. Gay cancer became GRID: Gay Related Immune Dysfunction. There was lots of speculation about its cause. Was it immune overload from all the sexually transmitted diseases gay men got? The use of recreational drugs like amyl nitrate? Or perhaps the enormous amounts of semen taken into the rectum were immunosuppressive?

  Reading these theories I breathed a sigh of relief. Neither John nor I had participated much in any of them. We were not fast-lane gays.

  As the disease became known as AIDS, the jokes started. ‘What disease do the Village People have? Bandaids.’

  Over our group of friends lay a pall of fear. Discussions would revolve around the latest theory or rumour. ‘We’re going to know people who will die from this.’

  We’d all nod, sadly. ‘Who do you reckon?’

  ‘So-and-so is such a slut. He uses the beat every day.’

  ‘A friend of mine saw Rock Hudson in a sauna in LA and he was lying on a bed with a towel over his head taking anyone who wanted him.’

  ‘If Rock had a towel over his head how did your friend know who it was?’

  My reaction was a mixture of repulsion and titillation.

  The world was changing. The words ‘anal sex’ were starting to appear on the front pages of newspapers, and gay men’s lives were combed thoroughly. There was a lot of hysteria. ‘Mosquitoes Spread AIDS,’ screamed one headline. ‘Die Poofter, Die!’ read another, quoting a father whose newborn triplets died after a blood transfusion traced to a gay man. AIDS and the fear of it were chipping away at us.

  Having lunch with a woman in my class, I asked for a sip of her orange juice. She handed me the glass. I took a sip and handed it back to her. She suddenly looked tense. ‘You can have it. I don’t want any more.’

  ‘Are you afraid that I might have AIDS?’ She was. ‘I don’t think I do, but even if I did you can’t get it from sharing a drink.’

  ‘That’s what they tell you. What about all those people who don’t know how they got it?’

  ‘If it was that easily spread, a lot more people would have it.’

  I didn’t feel like a leper but I was concerned for her, living in such a frightened world.

  PART THREE

  Soft Targets

  Chapter SEVEN

  Tested

  John was already working as a chiropractor when I graduated from NIDA. We wanted to be together, and since my agent and professional contacts were all in Sydney he agreed to move up from Melbourne, excited by the prospect of starting his own practice. His parents
discouraged the move.

  ‘Dad’s worried I might get AIDS,’ he told me.

  ‘What, gay means AIDS?’

  ‘For Dad I guess it does.’

  I wondered whether the prospect of moving away from his parents had helped him make his decision.

  We decided to share with Franco and found a cute little old shop with weird angles, wooden floors and salmon-pink walls. I had moved house many times over the past three years and had learnt persistence. John found it harder than me. His legs were aching by the end of the day. ‘I don’t understand it. They feel burnt out, like I’ve been for a very long run.’ He said he had noticed this before, when he was climbing hills. I suggested he see a doctor. ‘They’d only give me painkillers. I should get my spine looked at.’

  I was watching Rock Hudson and Doris Day in Pillow Talk when Franco arrived home. ‘Great film.’ He went to make tea, then put his head around the kitchen door. ‘There was a doco on the radio last night. I taped it. The first half is about the gay community’s response to AIDS and the second is interviews with people with AIDS. It’s very moving.’

  I put it on. The first part described a demonstration in San Francisco and then eavesdropped on the Gay Men’s Health Crisis phone-line. ‘Safe sex doesn’t have to be boring, you just gotta use your imagination. Honey, I’d rather be telling you this now than giving you the name of a doctor in two years. I know it’s hard but you just gotta hang in there.’

  The second part crept up on me and wrapped its hands around my throat. There was a woman talking about her home-care client. ‘When I first met Patrick, I was a little shocked. He was so thin but his spirit was extraordinary. Here was a guy who could barely breathe, cracking jokes. Laughing makes it a lot easier. Our friendship has been wonderful, but now that he’s really sick again …’ She started to choke back the tears and took a deep breath. ‘It’s a disaster. If this had been five hundred schoolkids, things would have been very different. You wonder sometimes if anyone cares.’