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He does the sex work between shows at night and he does it during the day. He does it because the stage is ‘pretty shitty money’, and because sex and shows are his only choices. Though it is distasteful at best and, of course, dangerous, sex work is normalised in this world where the possibility of an adequately paid straight job (assuming you managed to receive the requisite education or work experience in the necessary domestic peace most often reserved for your cisgender peers) is virtually eliminated if you choose to live full-time in the sex you were not assigned at birth. Most of his friends do sex work on the side; if not, they’re giving it away.
‘I’m a bit of a capitalist in that respect,’ he tells the girls when they go off with the punters who hang around backstage. ‘I love a dollar, nothing for nothing.’
He won’t remember any details about his first client apart from the fear and the adrenaline rush, but after that it becomes ‘like water off a duck’s back’. When Peter acknowledges that what he is doing is ‘pretty risky’, he is referring to the violence from the police and not the dangers posed by street prostitution. If the cops catch him soliciting they will arrest him or bash him senseless or both. So Peter and his friends rent a dark basement apartment in a beautiful old building on Grey Street where they can take clients. It’s always safer to work inside—and you never take them back to your own house.
In this way, although it’s a long way from his lab at the flour mill, he starts earning again. He buys furniture and clothes and costumes and make-up. As ‘the main supporter’ of the share house, he buys food and booze and drugs for everyone. He thinks nothing of spending fifty bucks at Clare’s Cakes on lemon tarts and vanilla slices, inviting people over for afternoon tea and then sweeping all the leftovers directly into the bin because he is no longer that boy who grew up scrounging for food.
‘It’s always Grand Central at my place,’ he complains proudly. He knows that he drops money like this to make himself feel better; his generosity is ‘a lonely thing’; a plea. He takes money for contact and he spends money for contact. But unlike the different service he offers to the faceless mugs who nod at him on the street, these bright things who pop over for a bite or a drink provide him with the friendship he needs to keep moving.
It is ‘action stations all the time’, there is always a party to go to. Peter lives now in an intensely social environment, a swirl of people—gay, lesbian, straight; queens and the moles that orbit them like lesser planets—all roiling together amid the audiences of hens’ nights and bucks’ nights and office workers out from the suburbs for a good time. Their shows have names like Les Girls and Play Girls and Belle Boys and Street Boys and Pokeys and Between the Sexes. His friends are guys and girls, ‘sex changers’ and not. They have the nicknames Gorilla Grip and Croc and PT, which stands for Painfully Thin.
They include those he will forget forever and those he will remember with forgiveness, like his boyfriend Frankie the Italian Stallion, ‘who’d root anything that moved, except the missus at home payin’ the bills’. Frankie takes Peter’s money but it’s nice to have someone to come home to, and for this, Peter forgives him everything, even when Frankie writes off his beautiful orange Monaro. When Nicole asks Peter why he lets Frankie stay, he smiles. ‘You pay for what you want,’ he says. ‘Everything in life has a price, you just have to decide whether you’re going to pay for it there and then or not.’
On the coffee table in every house is a bowl of mandies, a bowl of weed and a bowl of speed, all graciously offered like mints for visitors to help themselves. No one carries drugs, because of the police harassment they already attract by walking down the street in their own skin. For prescription drugs, there’s a doctor in St Kilda and another in North Melbourne who’ll give you pretty much anything. The girls go back and forth between the two. Peter never hears a quibble about who had how much, never hears anyone ask to be paid back. Life is communal for safety and for fun but also because, for many, this is now their only family. This also explains why, when Jullianne Deen closes the show with her number ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, slowly wiping off her make-up as she changes back into her boy clothes, ‘there isn’t a dry eye in the house’.
Peter looks at the shoes: three pairs, standing there like ghosts waiting for a train. The man who used to own them is dead, folded carefully like his work shirts and his pants and his vests into a couple of large rubbish bags that wait by the closed bedroom door.3
‘This is really it for good,’ Peter says to himself over and over, the thought like a shard of sea glass, wave-churned, smooth, but still with a sharp edge here and there. He’s already spent a week feeling like he’s been flayed alive, his cheeks bleeding, hardly able to speak. His subsequent visits three times a week for both waxing and electrolysis were far less painful and because he is so blond he never gets ‘the bluebeard regrowth look’.
He is still taking hormone pills from his doctor in Carlton but, after hearing some of the girls talk about hormone injections, he visited their doctor near the corner of Chapel Street. He has not shared with that doctor the fact that he is also taking hormones in pill form; he believes that doubling the hormones in this way will make them work better and faster. He willingly assumes the risks, and will never express regret: ‘Yes, it probably shortened my life, what it done to my liver and kidneys. But it also gave me the life I wanted.’
Now, this whole morning, he has been clearing out his small closet and few drawers, methodically but with intense emotion that encompasses both sadness and joy. This is a process he is going through alone, and though it is seismic, no one else is aware it is happening. He wonders every few minutes whether he is doing the right thing or if this is going to be an expensive and embarrassing mistake. He can’t say for sure what is driving him or where he is going or that it will be OK when he gets there; he just feels that this is the way he has to go.
Peter keeps folding and bagging, folding and bagging, and when the last item is done, she gathers up the bags and leaves the house in a long kaftan dress, locking the door behind her. As she walks out that day Stacey Anne Vaughan, sometimes known as Amanda Celeste Claire, shares many things, of course, with Peter Collins but the most important is that she will never fear what is ahead of her, only what is behind her.
Stacey has the best tits you’ve ever seen. Renee Scott, one of the Pokeys Dreamgirls, was meant to be the first to get the tit job with the incision under the arm, to keep the scarring out of sight. But Renee either got sick or chickened out, so Stacey became the first to get it done. Like most of the other girls, she went to the fancy surgeon on The Avenue in Windsor. Unlike most of the other girls, her breasts are now enormous, and with the double doses of hormones she has also put on weight. She returns to the surgeon to have her nose smoothed to a more delicate slope and then to have her eyes lifted. Her beauty, her plump softness, the ease with which she moves through the world as Stacey all mean that passing is never a problem. She is proud of the incredulity she regularly encounters. People say, ‘You’re not a drag!’
‘But I am a drag,’ she replies, smiling.
One day she is speeding to get her hair done when she is pulled over on the highway.
‘Nooo,’ the police officer says, patronising, looking down at the card she hands him through the window. ‘Not your husband’s licence. Your licence.’
‘That is my licence,’ she says.
He stands there for a long moment. He walks back to his car. Then he returns, puts one hand on the roof and bends down to peer in through her window. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he says quietly. ‘Just go. I’ll wait here for five minutes, and you can go.’
She rolls into her costume fittings with Jullianne Deen the Costume Queen, who calls everyone queenie or sweetpea and whom the girls call Mother. Here she spends hours gossiping and laughing, being fitted for the looks she will be wearing in the next show. On stage she is festooned, resplendent in Mother’s creations. As Celestial Star, she has hair th
e colour of a Coke can and transcendentally long legs, and she gets introduced on stage as the Girl with the Big Personality on account of her forty-eight-inch bust. The girls call her Celestial Monster in mockery of this abundant bosom.
She loves the music, exults in the movement and the lights and the audience and their applause, which she feeds off as validation that she looks ‘OK’. And she feels wonderful, energised, out-of-control-alive as though she is both starring in and watching herself in a movie playing on fast forward. As everyone says, ‘mandies make you randy’, a fact of which she is acutely aware each time she wakes up naked under a sinkful of vomit in the bathroom of an empty bar, not knowing when she passed out but feeling like she had another pretty good night.
She lives in Balaclava. Strathmore. Brunswick. Kensington. East St Kilda. Northcote. Carnegie. Caulfield. North Melbourne. Cheltenham. Everywhere.
Also nowhere, for an extended period of time. There are always a couple of people living with her and off her. Though they might do an occasional drag show, none of them works or contributes towards rent or household expenses.
When Nicole points this out, Stacey waves her concern away. ‘I’m always a bit of a suck to have people around and look after people. But that is the nature of me: I always provide, for some reason, I don’t know why. I always provide,’ she sighs.
Stacey shoots up speed with a little glass syringe that glints like jewellery and drives across the city between the house she is renting in Brunswick and the shows she’s dancing in and the brothels she’s working at. She makes good money in the twenty-buck fuck shops, those dark terrace houses along Nicholson Street in Fitzroy. The trick is to get the guys in, get them excited and get them out as quickly as possible. The more she can do fast like that, the more money she makes. She returns home to cook up a storm in the middle of the night; practises dance routines in the mirror; knocks down the back wall, planning on turning it into an atrium, airy and light, but then it all just seems too hard so she simply moves. The wind blows in through the broken bricks and over the old couch where she nodded off so many times just as the sun was rising; it chases itself around the empty rooms, stirring the rain and leaves and animal droppings that collect, eventually, on the floor.
She is Celestial Star and she is Stacey Anne but she is also the person to whom the letter is addressed which appears one day at her house like a haunting. It is mystifying to her how Linda found her address. All Stacey knows is that Linda must have found out that she was ‘making some money’ and decided that she ‘wanted a piece of the action’. So she changes her name and moves to another house. Stacey Phillips. Stacey Anne Vaughan. Celestial Star. Amanda Celeste Claire. Sandra Anne Vaughan. While these name changes are a normal and integral part of the process of finding who she is as a woman, they also make it easy to disappear altogether.
Her first and continuing reaction to her ex-wife is one of indignant flight. This does not change over time. ‘Linda already had the house, had everything, all I left with was just the car and clothes that I had and that was it. Everything else was for her.’ I ask Sandra whether she had left Linda with any savings (no) and how she thinks Linda would have managed to support their children and make the repayments on the house (don’t know). When I ask these questions, Sandra genuinely seems to be considering them for the first time and uninterested in pursuing them further. We have floated across the line and here we stay, becalmed, past her outer limits. The mediaeval horizon where you simply sailed off the edge of the earth or were swallowed whole by the monstrous beasts that swam there.
Two scenes of a homecoming. First: a charity dinner dance. She does not remember where the dance was or what it was for or how she ended up there, only that she ‘didn’t dream for one minute’ that she would see her little brother Simon there. He is now in his late teens, thin and serious and darkly handsome. He too has been kicked out of home by Bill. Suddenly, despite all her pride and all her confidence, she finds her face burning and her heart racing as she smiles at him and, above the sheer volume of everything that is not said between them, tells him she is happy to see him. She is genuinely so happy to see him.
‘Well,’ Simon says in his quiet voice as he looks at her shyly. ‘You’re the only Collins boy who’s ever done what he really wants to do.’ And then he puts his arms around her and he hugs her.
Months later, when she runs into him again, this time on the street, she is struck (even though she is speeding off her face) by the fact that he looks ‘like a hobo’.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ she asks him, astounded.
He tells her that his wife left him for his friend. That she took everything from their house one day while he was at work, including his Stones records. Sandra brings him back home with her and he stays there until he gets on his feet. Later, he enlists in the army where he will spend twenty-one years working as an engineer. They will always, each in their own way, adore each other.
Second: It is 1979. Sandra finds out that her father died six months ago. She calls her mother’s sister. ‘Aunty Bessie, this is…you know…who it is…Peter,’ Sandra says.
‘Oh, hello dear! Your mother would be so pleased,’ Aunty Bessie says, sounding happy to hear from her.
‘Well, I don’t know about that, because so much has happened…’
‘Oh no, she misses you terribly,’ Bessie soothes. ‘She’d love to hear from you. You know, she’s working at Fosseys in Footscray. She finishes every Saturday at noon and she’s home by twelve-thirty. Give her a call then, darl, she’d love to see you.’
Sandra works at a brothel on Saturdays so she arranges to take a day off. She stays in on Friday night to do her nails and gets up early on Saturday to wash and set her hair. And then she waits by the phone until twelve-thirty when she can, finally, call home.
‘Hello?’ Ailsa’s voice comes clear through the line.
‘Mum?’ Sandra says. ‘It’s…me here.’
‘Huh. You,’ Ailsa says and, for a long moment, she holds her silence before her like a switchblade. ‘You fuckin’ killed your father. I never wanna fuckin’ speak to you again.’
The sound of her mother swearing shocks her more, momentarily, than the words themselves or the spitting contempt in them.
‘You can get fucked!’ Sandra screams into the phone. She hangs up and slumps into a chair like a bag of ice. And it is as though she is still sitting there thirty-six years later when she tells me what was said at 12:31 that afternoon in 1979, her voice still thinned out by the hurt of it. ‘Had my hair done in anticipation of I was gonna see my mother…And…’cause…you know, I’d look after her when she was getting bashed, I climbed in the house through the window to go look after her when he was bashing her and then she’d make up with him and then I’d get bashed for looking after her! You know, so…it was a fuckin’ rocky road…’
That was the last time Sandra spoke with her mother, Ailsa Maggie Collins, who would die fourteen years later, on 2 November 1993, three days after which a requiem mass was offered at Our Lady of Perpetual Succour for the repose of her soul.
They dance in shows at the Prince of Wales and the Night Moves Disco and Bojangles, which they call Bowie’s or Bongland. They party at Annabel’s and Mandate and Spangles, the Whiskey A Go Go and the Key Club and the Savoy and the Dover Hotel and the Union Hotel and Maisy’s Hotel and, if they’re up that way and out of options, that cheap and nasty place in North Melbourne run by the gay guy with tragic shows full of people only starting out in the scene (a biting assessment which shows not only how far Sandra’s settled into her skin now, but also how far the city has come).
Sandra missed the early days, in the late sixties, when one of the few chances to socialise in safety was at the private camp dances, organised by Jan Hillier, that migrated around Melbourne. It was all very furtive: couples would spring apart and grab the nearest person of the opposite sex if a cop showed up to check the liquor licence.
So despite the constant threat of poli
ce violence, normalised by a society in which homosexuality is officially a mental illness and a crime, the fact that Sandra and her friends now have commercial venues to visit should not be taken for granted. When Hillier and her partner, ‘drag impresario’ Doug Lucas, first approached the Prince of Wales in 1977 about establishing the regular gay night that would become Pokeys, the hotel manager doubted that a drag show could fill the pub’s entire first floor. So they were given only one room, with the consequence, so the story goes, that on opening night hundreds of customers were turned away.
By the late seventies, progress in open socialising reflected and encouraged changing attitudes; it was possible now to think in terms of an actual gay ‘community’.4 The degree to which that community reflected and promoted the rights and needs of all its members—transgender men and women in particular—is open to question. However, it was better than what had gone before.
When I ask Sandra whether she was involved with any of the activist groups in the seventies, like Gay Liberation or Society Five, her answer is both surprising and not.
‘No,’ she says, batting away the question. ‘I was never political. I never drew attention to myself.’ And her statement is not untrue because she was Celestial Star the Girl with the Big Personality twirling topless on stage night after night. It is untrue because in exercising her right to be who she was and to not make it the focus of her life any more than, say, the fact that she was adopted or from the western suburbs, she was in this, yes, quiet way of insisting on living her own life, powerfully political.
When Sandra and I visit Doug Lucas, they work out that they have not seen each other since around the year I was born. It must be quite a trip to come face to face with someone you haven’t seen for thirty-six years, but Sandra is zero awkward on first greeting Doug and during the initial small talk, and the deeper dive that follows. Although, as Doug puts it, she ‘just disappeared’ one day from the scene, leaving him to always wonder what happened to ‘Stacey’, she slots enthusiastically back in, asking after old friends, paging through his photo albums, laughing when he wistfully recalls what a good-looking man she was, hopping up to make tea because Doug has put on enough weight now that it’s taxing for him. Sitting side-saddle at his kitchen table, Doug fills Sandra in on where all the girls are now. Sandra hears the names of people and places forgotten for over three decades and when this happens her eyes squint and then open joyfully, the skin snaps back a little, it is 1978 and she is young again.
The Trauma Cleaner Page 9
