Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  He said it was a matter of trust.

  We said we saw it more as a question of ‘miner’s right’ – if you work in a coal mine you have a right to free coal.

  ‘Anyhow,’ he said, dolefully, ‘They’ll all be sorry when the backlash against universities reduces us all to nothing more than public servants.’

  We left the staff club and its doleful drinking to go to the philosophy department where the radicals were happily using university facilities for their party. They were singing sentimental Irish songs under the banner ‘Philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world – the point now is to change it’.

  They had two four-gallon casks of wine – which is counter-culturally acceptable alcohol: spirits and beer are frowned upon, spirits because of their upper-income connotations and beer because it is associated with the worst kinds of Australian male behaviour.

  We talked briefly with George Molnar, a lecturer in philosophy who had been centrally active in the strike. He was making the ‘goodies’ in the kitchen (not savouries).

  ‘Tomorrow the world,’ he said.

  We were told a number of anecdotes about the strike, none of which we can vouch for but which in themselves illustrate the spirit, and the tensions, surrounding the strike. We tell them now not to degrade the issues but to convey a flavour.

  George himself had condemned a group of students as ‘middle class’ during a meeting, which led a few to stand up individually and declare their working-class origins. One of the middle-class woman students leaned across to the working-class woman who’d stood up near her and said, ‘Believe me, it feels okay being middle class.’

  And that’s right, not enough credit is given to the middle class.

  There was naturally much side discussion about whether the dispute was in fact a ‘strike’ – who was withholding labour from whom? Some preferred to carry on a ‘work-in’.

  We talked with a tutor from anthropology who had ‘worked-in’ and asked her how you could distinguish between those not on strike and those who were ‘working-in’.

  ‘You have to ask them,’ she said with a shrug.

  We were told that Professor Leonie Kramer, because of her opposition to the strike, had been declared an ‘honorary male’ – one of the women’s movement’s severest epithets of scorn.

  Miss Betty Archdale, who is on the senate committee of inquiry into the dispute, is reported to have asked whether the two woman tutors involved in the dispute had strong enough voices to be heard at the back of a lecture theatre.

  We were told that a telegram boy who delivered a telegram of goodwill to the Women’s Embassy tent, set up in the university quadrangle, showed not the slightest curiosity or bewilderment at finding women sitting in tents in the middle of a university.

  John Roche of the English department was at the victory party, singing away. We expressed our surprise: ‘But John, you were against the women’s course!’

  ‘Yes – but I was for the strike,’ he said, making a fine academic distinction.

  It was a good party. Any group that can have a good party is okay with us.

  A Film Producer Comes Out

  Richard Brennan

  (abridged, from Nation Review, June 1975)

  Somewhere in the early sixties I met Richard Brennan, Mitchum and Marlboroish, hanging solid and slow on the Sydney scene, in pushy pubs and student movies. In love with cinema, Richard developed an expertise, and I rediscovered him years later featured in Cinema Papers, in the middle of The Removalists, with the success of a Bazza behind him. A quick flash of him in the Office Picnic, with towels and jockish, seemed only a slight caricature of the sexuality he projected from the bar. This document ends – in his words – twenty years of deception. Its significance is not so much as another creak of the closet door, but as testament to the lengths men still go to hide their real feelings from one another. Maybe it’s the recent lunar eclipse, but at this time many people broadly in Brennan’s milieu are suffering breakdowns, cracking up, going mad, suiciding and shooting up … suffocating in the closets of their own making, unable to discover their own identity or to reach out for understanding. I like what men are learning from women: to put their emotions on the table, to show their underbellies to the sun.

  Richard Neville

  Six months ago I made a list of people with whom my relations could be called close. It came to 123 of which group 15 knew me to be homosexual. The 15 included no female with whom I have had any sort of involvement and no member of my family.

  At the age of twelve some school friends told me about homosexuals – men who are attracted to other men. I prevented myself from asking ‘But isn’t everybody?’ and chalked it up as another experience. The world is cruel and to thrive one must conceal one’s feelings. I embarked on a career of deception which lasted almost twenty years. At the end of that time I had achieved some degree of local success as a film producer. I was insolent and had doggedly perfected a manner combining the mantree swagger of Robert Mitchum, the abstractedness of Alan Ladd and an almost totally manufactured exuberance. I believed that I suggested the authority that goes with concealed weapons.

  There was another side. I lacked the virtues. What they were I did not know but I knew that I lacked them. I expect that I am rational but I do suffer from a state of over-amiability in which failure to please everyone creates a condition of acute self-reproach. None of my friends was homosexual, or near enough to none as makes no difference. I went from film to film submitting my credentials, agreeing on a price, doing the job and checking out. Somehow this fantasy world obsessed me – persuading a group of people to pretend to be another group of people so that a third group of people could pretend to be deceived. Any preoccupation I had with my own loneliness, or indeed ethics, could be pushed aside. I fled from job to job sometimes involving myself with three at a time to blot out a fear which became the only constant in my life.

  Some of the films I have worked on are good – scripts which mock false concepts of manliness always attract me. Others were little better than comic strips. In the past four years if no job has been available I have recurringly fled to the solitude of London. Homosexual acquaintances criticised me for my hypocrisy and I replied by railing against the myth of the liberating power of truth. I was not going to lose family and friends to defend a group of people with whom I had nothing in common but an accident of nature – demonstrably the product of fear and ignorance.

  Besides, I was not queer, I was bisexual, only a little bit homosexual. And this last was true. My orientation is only slightly homosexual – say about 75 to 80 per cent. I suppose I could discuss the other 20 per cent, and my mastery of the laws of physics, but the object of this article was a statement of pride in, and friendship towards, my fellow gays, so I don’t think that would serve much purpose.

  I wore the mask well, and almost never let it slip. Offhand, I can remember once telling a journalist that I had no desire to direct films because it is too ‘self-revealing’. On other occasions I reacted ferociously to any suggestion that I was paranoid, being acutely aware of the thesis that the roots of paranoia are in repressed homosexuality. Beside my bed is a reproduction of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy made out of butterflies wings. Small hints. Privately I was obsessed with the phantom of inevitable discovery and resultant failure. From a gentle little boy who dreamed of being a mountie, handsomely clad against the cold and always getting my man, I became an increasingly alcohol-dependent adult, occasionally violent, and with a permanent twitch in my left eyelid. From time to time the fact that my persona and mode of life bore no resemblance to reality bothered me. Small flashes. A nagging additional fear that I had made the wrong choice.

  Without good luck I don’t think that I would ever have emerged from my closet. Following an article on the Sydney Push in the National Times, Richard O’Sullivan wrote a letter which said in part, ‘a well-known creative figure is forced to maintain a butch image and is presently conducting a clandestine a
ffair with his current boyfriend’. Actually the only forcing was being done by me and the relationship is less than clandestine. After many years I had finally appreciated the futility of pissing on one’s friends and lovers in order to maintain the esteem of people for whom I generally felt little or nothing. I saw myself for the first time as just another loud-mouthed tourist.

  I suppose there are some excuses for closet-queenery. Having been one for so many years I would like to think so. But they do not rest in logic. My obsession with cinema is preceded by and almost matched in intensity by a love of books. For years I have been aware of the hatred which homosexuality inspired in writers like Hemingway and Mailer, and particularly the critics of Time magazine. I recall reading Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep at the age of thirteen: ‘I took plenty of the punch. It was meant to be a hard one but a pansy has no iron in his bones whatever he looks like.’ The hero’s opponent has just killed the murderer of his lover, and the hero, Marlowe, takes considerable pleasure in describing his eventual fate in the gas chamber to him, gratuitously tossing in ‘You must have thought a lot of that queen’. Emile Griffith killed Benny Paret, a contender for his world boxing title over just such a jibe. In an interview with sports writer Pete Hamill, Paret said: ‘I hate that kind of guy. A fighter’s got to look and talk and act like a man.’ I would remark that it was a fatal error in taste except that his death gives me no pleasure. But it illustrates something of the fear and hatred which surrounds the homosexual and can produce a consequently intense fear and hatred in him or her.

  The male homosexual is acutely aware that he exists in a society in which people are frequently openly and cruelly critical of anyone whose manhood they suspect.

  … Dennis Altman also takes the position that we are bisexual. His book Homosexual is undoubtedly one of the two or three best works on the subject, and provoked a predictably illogical reaction from Time’s literary mafia:

  Altman does a great disservice to the basic cause of improving the homosexual’s condition by overstating the link between acceptance of homosexual behaviour, and a vastly improved society. To read him is to be reminded of Russell Baker’s remark that: ‘Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists upon it …’ The chest-thumping insistence that homosexual love is just like (and exactly as desirable as) heterosexual love is self-defeating. It is also biologically inaccurate, and socially unsound … homosexual love is regarded as deviant because no children can be born of it, and for that reason there is a protective reaction to it by the ‘normal’.

  I must concede that I know of no children born of homosexual unions but we are a preternaturally talented group of people and if we try hard enough I am sure that it may happen. I am often annoyed by the willingness of gay apologists to descend to the low level of argument of their heterosexual persecutors. It is not necessary for us to defend the validity of our pleasure. Rather they owe us an explanation of their persistent infringements of our liberty. Kinsey estimates that one sixth of the American male population and one eighth of the female population are predominantly or exclusively homosexual. Given that these figures probably approximate in other western societies the ridiculousness of our toadying to straight rules is pointed up.

  To me the most saddening of these exercises in being straighter than straight are the pleas for the legalisation of homosexual marriage. Why anybody would aspire to the straightjacket model of heterosexual marriage bewilders me. A persistent criticism of gays is that they are promiscuous and the reaction of some gays is to deny this rigorously, thus tacitly acknowledging that promiscuity is incompatible with lasting relationships. Understandably, they are confused and depressed by the hostility of a society whose social fabric is woven from marriages, mortgages and 2.8 children. For myself I have had many happy relationships without lifelong contracts or indeed sexual exclusiveness. The fact that I bear no relation to a model for Australian youth does not cause me to sleep any less soundly.

  I do not subscribe to the theory that we are all bisexual. I acknowledge that it is biologically true, but there are as many homosexuals who manifest no interest in the other sex as there are rigid heterosexuals. Those of us who have sustained both types of relationship would be more accurately described as heterosexual and homosexual.

  I mentioned earlier my own fears of loss of family and friends. I did not mention job, because I anticipate finding some means or another of trading on public amazement until I am scythed by the grim reaper. I can still do everything that I ever could. Not that I ever did much.

  Somehow I had never seen a connection between financial status and openness about one’s sexuality. When homosexuals are spoken of as oppressed one tends to think of the beatings that some have inflicted on them or of police entrapment. I have been involved in some altercations but they have derived from unpaid restaurant bills and arguments about films – natural hazards of a colourful existence. And as a child of the middle class I have never really expected to be jailed for a victimless crime.

  Oppression is a larger state than this. Maud Humphries describes it as obtaining ‘when those holding authority systematically impose burdens and penalties on relatively powerless segments of society’. The occupational–financial oppression of gays is considerable. For many years I worked with a film producer who made no secret of his homosexuality. He was a successful producer but aroused tremendous antagonism for his indifference to the norms of the Australian film industry. I frequently defended him for his generosity, courage and loyalty, but these attributes were invariably passed aside as covers for an insatiable sex drive, probably directed towards the complainant. I believe that he was a monogamous person but his future ability to withstand pressure, cast actresses successfully, and in general survive the hurly-burly of the male world of film-making were persistently denigrated.

  Film and theatre are traditionally liberal areas, although I have seen little evidence of this. The quality which would strike most outsiders about film-makers is their overwhelming narcissism and sense of their own importance. In fairness I should add that I know almost no Australian who does not describe himself or herself as a film producer. Almost no person in cinema, television and theatre who is known to be homosexual ever publicly confirms this fact on the assumption that the straight world will never forgive being told. This policy of relentless self-advancement is particularly felt by those friends who are advised as to how they must behave on the phone, on the street or in front of visitors.

  There are few jobs open to blacks in America other than as porters, janitors or prizefighters. Likewise, the overt gay in Australia is expected to take a job with a traditionally accepted homosexual linkage, such as hairdressing, interior design, and male nursing, or a low-status job like short-order cooking, working as a waiter, or as a proof-reader.

  Homosexual relationships, by their very nature, are non-reproductive, which is probably a reason that gays have not developed the sense of history or community that other marginal groups have achieved. Moreover their facelessness precludes any group identification. Homosexual characters in the arts are presented as strident and nerve-ridden. Even when sympathetically characterised, as in Sunday, Bloody Sunday or Cabaret, the gay is depicted as manipulative and uncontrolled, bent on altering the lives of others yet failing to give proper emotional support when it is required. Nervous tension and the fear of loneliness do characterise many homosexuals, as they do the lives of heterosexuals. I find some Australian writers very accurate on this point. Hal Porter’s Watcher on the Cast Iron Balcony and several of Frank Moorhouse’s short stories vividly depict the confusion of a person confronting their own homosexuality. The early section of James Baldwin’s Another Country, which deals with the last days of a young negro musician, is excellent as is the whole of Charles Wright’s little known novel The Messenger.

  It is hard to convey the sense of becoming aware of one’s homosexuality to someone who is not. I felt a strong sense of recognition when I read Colin Spencer’s Anarchists in Love
:

  He felt there was something false about his passion and desire for women, while when he had sex with youths his own age it was all so offhand, so casual that in fact it seemed quite natural. He was frightened by the naturalness of it for he felt that maybe it bound him, that all his life he’d be stuck, fixed into that particular brand of sterile love-making. So he felt all the time that he must get out, get away, run from affairs and relationships with young men or else they would snare him. He must try always to bridge the gulf that he felt lay between him and that mysterious unknown quality, woman.

  … He had only felt defeated again by women. They were unkind. They saw too deeply into one. They saw all through the masculine prefabrications, the vain defences, the barricades. But if you went to bed with a boy, you helped each other, you ensured each other’s insulations, you never tore each other apart, for the masculine artificial dignity was necessary to you both and so you both simulated false passion, your body was sated and your mind left empty and undisturbed.

  For as long as the stigma is attached to homosexuality there will be people, particularly young ones, torn by these stresses, simulating ‘masculine’ attributes such as cruelty, loudness, and intolerance, believing that because they are despised they must be despicable. If I could remove that stigma in any way I would be pleased. To risk the displeasure of one’s friends is not a trivial concern but if I lost every straight friend I have that would suit me better than continued participation in a pattern of pretence and deceit. I know what I want. I am the only one who is going to get it. If this article provides the means or the method for others to feel the same confidence the fulfilment will be mutual.

  In Melbourne, Meanjin Quarterly, Australia’s oldest intellectual magazine, edited then by its founder, C. B. Christesen, was able to publish the following piece by Norman Bartlett, oblivious to what was happening in Sydney writing and, to a degree, in Melbourne writing.