by Tommy Murphy
BOB. The Melbourne Age, January 27, 1992.
PETER. The Sydney Star Observer, January 30, 1992.
BOB. Caleo, John Robert.
PETER. John Caleo.
BOB. Sleep peacefully, my son, now there’s no more pain.
PETER. We won’t forget your fighting spirit and your kind and innocent heart.
BOB. You will always be remembered until we meet again.
PETER. Our love and support to Tim Conigrave, John’s partner in life for the past fifteen years.
BOB. All our love, Mum, Dad, Michael, Paul, Christopher and Anthony.
Exit BOB and PETER.
* Countdown was changed to ‘TV’ for the West End production.
Epilogue
TIM. Dear John,
I am sitting in the garden at the back of my hotel, surrounded by orange trees and bougainvilleas. After the madness of the northern cities, the island of Lipari is paradise.
I visited the island of Salina yesterday, the island where your grandparents were born. It was a bit like a private pilgrimage. It is almost barren, lots of rock and caper bushes. The café is only open for an hour and you can understand why they emigrated.
The most unnerving thing: here on Lipari there is a beautiful boy who works in the bar in our hotel. He is so like you he could easily be one of your brothers. He was born here but his family is not Caleo. He is so gentle and so shy. We try to talk but he speaks Liparota, a dialect I can’t understand. He occupies my dreams. I fall in love so easily these days.
Life is pretty good at the moment: I have my health and seem to be doing most of the things I want to do before I die. I guess the hardest thing is having so much love for you and it somehow not being returned. I develop crushes all the time but that is just misdirected need for you. You are a hole in my life, a black hole. Anything I place there cannot be returned. I miss you terribly.
The actor playing JOHN leaves the stage.
Ci vedremo lassù, angelo.
ACTOR PLAYING TIM. Timothy Conigrave died in October 1994. Holding the Man was published in 1995: a gift to John. The End.
The End.
‘It’s hard work being a Pink Clown’
This photo appears in the scrapbook that John and his friends made for Tim as a farewell gift when he left for NIDA in 1981. That book features in the play in Act One, Scene Nineteen.
(Courtesy of Prue Holt.)
Afterword
Tommy Murphy
At Tim Conigrave’s funeral, at St Canice’s Catholic Church in Sydney, Nick Enright, one of Tim’s acting teachers, warned the congregation that a book was imminent. It must have made more than a few people sweat because, as Nick wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald in June 1995, ‘Tim was a stranger to tact.’ In the more than thirty or so interviews I conducted with relatives and friends – many of them characters in the play – often they admitted, sometimes with a hushed tone and a smile, that Tim could be a bit difficult. But this is obvious. It is why we have his memoir of such striking frankness and unapologetic honesty.
Since it was first published in 1995, Holding the Man has been reprinted fourteen times with subsequent editions in Spain and North America. It won the United Nations Human Rights Award for Non-Fiction and was listed as one of the ‘100 Favourite Australian Books’ by the Australian Society of Authors in 2003.
Tim’s life story is shaped by two intertwining passions: his love for John Caleo and a keen need for self-expression. Tim and John united as teenagers via a Melbourne school production of Romeo and Juliet. They were torn apart when Tim left to train as an actor at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney. Shortly after graduating, Tim initiated a devised play called Soft Targets, Australia’s first theatrical response to HIV/AIDS; whilst doing so he discovered that he and John were HIV positive. Some years later, a staged reading of Tim’s play Thieving Boy became the catalyst for admitting to his friends that he had AIDS. Tim toured Australia as an actor and wrote four plays. He also found his voice in his dedication to social work. John worked as a chiropractor with his own practice in Sydney. At the end of their story it is Tim’s expressiveness that comes to the fore. Lessons in love, in activism and in art culminate in the writing of his memoir: a kind of love letter to John, a means of saying thank you for all the love and sorry for all the pain. According to his friends, Tim prolonged his life, warding off the ravages of his disease to complete this final writing project. Tim delivered the manuscript for Holding the Man to his publisher from his hospice bed within weeks of his death. The voice of Tim the activist is present throughout the play and the memoir, but the urgency to speak is about more than politics. Tim’s Holding the Man transcends its era, it transcends sexuality and it transcends its nation of origin. It is the love story that takes centre stage.
It is not insignificant that Tim enlisted Nick Enright, one of Australia’s leading playwrights, when he needed an objective editorial eye for Holding the Man. Theatre pumps in the veins of this memoir. When Tim faxed his publisher a sample of his writing, he described ‘scenes’ from his book. Perhaps the idea for a stage adaptation was always embedded in the material…
*
I met with David Berthold, then artistic director of Sydney’s Griffin Theatre Company, at the nearby Tropicana Café in 2005. We were discussing ideas for the adaptation of a book that includes the lines:
…the artistic director of the company [and I] met among the black leather jackets at the Tropicana Café…‘I’ve read the play and I think it’s really good, but it definitely needs more work.’
The Stables Theatre, home of Griffin, has nurtured many a theatrical life, including Timothy Conigrave’s. The fact that some of our scenes for the adaptation were to be performed on a stage that the protagonist had known could have remained a trivial footnote. In fact, that connection to a theatre, and to theatre itself, became the key that unlocked this play.
Telling the story of a theatre-maker invites theatricality. Tim, the character, is our central storyteller bound never to leave the stage, confiding in us, trusting us with the details of his life.
Time is malleable; it stands still or it races according to Tim. In the end, time accelerates because, in this story, time is running out. A theatrical playfulness might take us into the madness of young love, later mirrored as the madness of illness. The procession of many people through a life’s journey is maintained with an ensemble transforming, sometimes morphing, the traffic of characters. I watched the Australian production from backstage one night when it had transferred to Sydney Opera House. The quick-changes behind the scenes are nearly as entertaining as those on stage. Perhaps that’s the crucial thing that embracing theatricality granted us in this adaptation: fun. Fun is a quality that Tim imbued and, as Brecht tells us, the theatre needs no other passport.
While I was writing the adaptation, David Berthold and I flew to Melbourne and were invited into the Conigrave home. I spied the corridor where John snuck into Tim’s room. The sunroom must be through there. This first meeting was to become typical of the family’s support for the project and their obvious pride for Tim. On opening night, Mrs Conigrave told Guy Edmonds, the actor portraying her son: ‘This play is a way for Tim to live on. If he were alive, he’d be staging this tonight.’
The Caleo family was notified that the book would be adapted for the stage but, out of respect, we didn’t initially approach them for research. Then, on our first preview, David Berthold got a tap on the shoulder. ‘Hello, I am Anthony Caleo, John’s baby brother.’ The little boy Tim describes in the book standing ‘shyly on the outer, smiling bashfully’ had grown up. He had come with his mother’s blessing to represent the family at the first opportunity. He saw the play several times. He posted this comment on a blog:
All of the fondest memories about John floated through my mind whilst I absorbed the play, trying to reconcile why the most beautiful people are always taken from us. Unfortunately, it was incredibly difficult to witness his death in the play as
it was portrayed so wonderfully and sensitively by David Berthold’s cast. I will miss John forever and I feel complete after seeing this work of art. I now have closure.
Though I could never meet him, I somehow sought to collaborate with Tim Conigrave. I uncovered many documents, including Tim’s drafts, helping my understanding of scenes in the book. Peter Craig contacted me early on, armed with extensive albums of overseas trips, and one photo of John with the drip feed in his nose, clearly very ill, at the lighthouse at Byron Bay. Tim’s schoolteacher sent me annuals and yearbooks. In an old boys’ newsletter in 1992, Tim has registered himself as a widower. Leaflets from the homosexual conference they attended came our way. Ten seconds of video, rescued from a chewed tape, gave us a glimpse of John’s thirtieth birthday at a noisy dinner table. It displays their characters according to the book: Tim is pulling faces, while John is amused but quietly eating his meal… Then it cuts out. One photo has Tim at John’s funeral about to be hugged by Marie: he looks blank. During the Melbourne transfer of the play, a close friend of Tim and John, Prue Holt, brought the actual book that John gave Tim as a farewell gift in 1981. It floored the cast to see it because it is recreated as a prop in the play. The artifact still exists; John’s book for Tim also outlives them. All these documents signify an obvious but sometimes unfathomable fact: though we meet them in a book, they are not the stuff of fiction. These people were real, their love was real, and so was their suffering.
Tim was interviewed for a three-hour National Library of Australia oral history. Recorded at his home in January 1993, it captures Tim formulating many of the stories he will tell in the book. That day he has been to an ‘AIDS funeral’ and regrets that his late friend was unable to finish a creative project. Tim is pragmatic when he accepts that creativity cannot keep people alive. He didn’t know that his would.
In the interview, Tim tells, without emotion, of mood swings and depression, of grief, Toxoplasmosis, PCP, and a handful of twenty-five pills a day, under the effects of which he has begun an important task: a book.
In the last twelve months – because it is almost twelve months since my lover died… I have lost my lover; I’ve lost my house… I moved out of there because after six months I couldn’t quite cope. I don’t work any more. I’m now on the pension. So there are all these fairly major changes in my life… My T-Cells are zero and have been since July of the year before last [1991]… So, basically I’m available to any disease that wants me… I don’t think I’m waiting to die. I don’t think it’s very far away… It’s a bit hard when you’re in pain like I was yesterday… It’s actually sometimes very hard to just sort of get your spirits up. This morning I woke up and I felt so fantastic that I got up and, you know, did some writing…
In sheer selflessness, Tim omits from Holding the Man this chapter of his own superhuman strength. Words spoken in Tim’s interview could have held their place in the book:
I feel like I’m looking down the barrel of my own life at the moment. Because I have this gastric ulcer which is being scoped tomorrow. And that’s what was the beginning of the end for my lover because that was the lymphoma… That’s my freak-out… The only thing I have to live for is these two things that I am writing, which I’d like to finish both of. One’s a play that involves stuff about AIDS but it’s not really about AIDS, and the other one is the book that I’d like to write about my lover and I, which I’ve started.
Towards the end of their story, when our star-crossed couple has overcome every challenge to being together for ever, it is their own mortality that, of course, bears the greatest threat. But they do survive. Tim writes his memoir, and the young lovers transcend even death.
A foot(y)note: The phrase ‘holding the man’ is not explained in the memoir or the play. It is not just that it comes from John’s sport. In Australian Rules Football, ‘holding the man’ is an offence that incurs a penalty; in his case, a cruel and undeserved one.
Timeline
Timothy Conigrave born.
19 Nov 1959
John Caleo born.
30 May 1960
Timothy Conigrave first sees John Caleo on day one at Xavier College (high school), Melbourne.
1972
On the far side of the crush I noticed a boy… He was beautiful, calm. I was transfixed.
(From Holding the Man)
Tim and John become boyfriends.
1976
He smelt like soap and clean clothes. Just holding and kissing gently. Little angel kisses. If this had been it, if I had died then, I would have said it was enough.
(From Holding the Man)
Xavier College school magazine, Sursum Corda, acknowledges Tim and John as a couple.
1977
John starts training as a chiropractor. Tim enrols in Science at Monash University, Melbourne.
1978
Inaugural Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras to mark International Gay Solidarity Day.
1978
Clusters of gay men with rare skin cancers and pneumonia alert US authorities to a disease that wrecks the immune system and exposes the body to opportunistic disease.
Early 1980s
Tim moves to Sydney; their relationship is on hiatus.
1981
I know you’ll be a success, Tim, once you’ve set yourself a target, I wish I could be with you as you achieve it… John xx
(From the book John and their friends made Tim as a farewell gift.)
Tim studies acting at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney.
1981–4
AIDS is officially named – Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
1982
The disease had been referred to as GRID (‘gay-related immune deficiency’), ‘gay cancer’ or ‘community-acquired immune dysfunction’.
First Australian death from HIV/AIDS (1993 analysis).
Dec 1983
The Australian Government responds to the looming HIV/AIDS crisis. A bipartisan coalition collaborates with clinicians and medical researchers, community activists groups and committed individuals to create radical and pragmatic policies. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has singled out the success of this unified action.
Mid 1980s
These policies have kept Australia’s rates of HIV and AIDS among the lowest in the developed world. We have less than 10% of the per capita rates of HIV and AIDS in Australia than, for example, in the United States. In human terms, the dividend of our policies has been the tens of thousands of young Australians who have grown up untouched by HIV infection, and who have not died from AIDS.
(Bill Bowtell, Director of the Lowy Institute’s Asia Pacific HIV Project, 2007)
Rock Hudson, the first American celebrity to publicly admit having AIDS, dies of the disease.
Oct 1985
Tim initiates Australia’s first theatrical response to HIV/AIDS, Soft Targets, at Griffin Theatre Company as part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival.
1985–6
This group-devised work performs the almost sacred function of primeval drama: to demystify the irrational and explain the incomprehensible, to purge the fear of the unknown and usher its audience into the realm of understanding.
(Sydney Morning Herald, 28 Feb 1986)
Tim and John test positive for HIV.
1985
ACON is established to help fight the spread of HIV and to provide care and support for people affected by HIV/AIDS. Tim worked and volunteered for ACON for nearly ten years.
1985
ACON has evolved to become Australia’s largest community-based gay lesbian, bisexual and transgender health and HIV/AIDS organisation. Tim also worked for Twenty10 – the state’s peak support agency for young people of diverse genders and sexualities.
The agent that causes AIDS becomes officially known as the Human-Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).
1986
President Ronald Reagan first uses the word ‘AIDS’ in public.
1986
(Act Up AIDS coalition)
John acquires his own chiropractor clinic in North Sydney.
1987
First anti-HIV drug, azidothymidine (AZT) is approved after trials showed it slows, but does not halt, the progress of the virus.
1987
Tim and John travel to Italy, from where the Caleo family descended.
Nov
1988
I knew as we left Italy that I would come back some day.
(From Holding the Man)
Tim, John and their friend from university days, Peter Craig, drive north to Byron Bay. Peter also takes unpaid leave from Fairfield Hospital, Melbourne, to help care for John.
1991
John Caleo dies, Melbourne.
26 Jan 1992
Tim is interviewed for a National Library oral history.
Jan 1993
Tim faxes two short stories to publisher Sophie Cunningham from the ACON office. ‘The First Boy I Loved’, a precursor to Holding the Man, had been published in Outrage, a Melbourne-based gay magazine.
