My old friend and I met in a theatre foyer in Melbourne to see a play set a century ago. I was down from my home in Sydney, visiting family, and he was here from New York, doing the same. There was a kiss on the cheek, no doubt a hug. I couldn’t tell you who kissed who, because in normal circumstances I wouldn’t have given our greeting a second thought.
What will stay in my mind is the elderly man, a stranger, who approached us. Marvellous was the word he used. How marvellous that my friend and I could greet one another like that, he said, without any hint of self-consciousness. Then, he turned and walked away.
How extraordinary, I thought, that this man was so happy for us, a pair of strangers, and that he could remark upon an everyday exchange of affection between two friends at basic physical ease with one another.
Which, I am guessing, might have been an extraordinary event in this old man’s day. I pondered what repression growing up in Australia he might have encountered. I will never know. Public affection in the safe space of a modern theatre, where old ideas go to get challenged, was not such a stretch for my platonic pal and myself.
And yet, self-conscious editing is what we gay men do all the time in the street. I remember in the early 2000s, the morning after a Mardi Gras party, when my partner took my hand beside a busy road as we walked together. That hadn’t happened before; it hasn’t happened since. But somehow, at the time, it seemed enough. Marvellous, in fact.
We are still together. It’s been 18 years now. As I write this, my partner is chasing the dog around the apartment for its weekly bath. Marriage equality has landed safely in two dozen countries, and only Ireland and Australia have seen fit to put the issue to a public vote. I am reminded of satirist David Sedaris’s line questioning why anyone should get to vote on same-sex unions: it’s about as reasonable as polling whether redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.
Flip comedy is a good way to cope with repression. No wonder Sedaris, who’s touring again in January, finds such a connection with audiences here.
Next year, 2018, will be the 40th anniversary of Mardi Gras. Out of the bars and into the streets, the impromptu marchers called as Glad to be Gay was pumped through a speaker off the back of a truck that night in 1978. For their trouble, 53 people were arrested, some of them beaten and verbally abused. Arguably, Mardi Gras has had limited political effect: NSW took until 1984, three years longer than Victoria, to decriminalise homosexuality, despite playing host to this huge queer parade and party.
But socially and culturally, the importance of celebration should never be underestimated in a country where same-sex public affection is still rare for the rest of the year. In Kings Cross, Riot, a television series about that first Mardi Gras has been filmed. It’s due to air early next year, with great Australian character actors including Damon Herriman and Kate Box. How hopeful we remain for 2018. How hopeful I remain, at age 50, that equality will finally ring out in this land.
As the mail bags set out for the Australian Bureau of Statistics – forms for the $122 million, non-binding same-sex marriage survey can still be dropped off at ABS office drop-off locations until 4:30pm on Tuesday, with results to be announced on 15 November – I pondered those bags’ contents, filled with ticks of approval or denial of essentially whether I can fully enjoy my rights as a citizen of this immature country. I mulled over this in a Skype conversation with an Australian-born dancer in his new home in the UK. Two years ago, he married his UK-born boyfriend in the British consulate at Sydney’s Circular Quay. A gorgeous ceremony, he recalls.
On the same day we talked, the Turnbull government unilaterally rejected the Uluru statement from the Heart and the referendum to establish an Indigenous representative body. About 600 male asylum seekers, 447 of whom have been confirmed as refugees, wait in limbo on Manus Island, in despairing lives of indefinite incarceration. The dancer, poised to come back to perform in Sydney, was unsure whether he’d ever return to live in Australia, waiting to find out the realities of Brexit, but he was adamant the UK arts scene had been more embracing of his perceived physical disability – cerebral palsy – than Australia had been.
We talked about the cliché of the tall poppy syndrome. Clichés exist for a reason, of course. They often have an unpalatable kernel of truth. “You can’t be proud of your achievements, because that’s not Australian,” the dancer said. Of course, this made sense. A nation founded on the oppression of convicts, of denial of its own frontier war history with its Indigenous population, might just have a self-conscious problem of anyone rising above their designated station. Self-esteem issues.
People who feel bad about themselves try to bring others down, the dancer remarked. How true. Now Turnbull’s conservatives are jockeying with competing bills to legislate marriage equality under sufferance, calling for a “no detriment” clause to allow people to reject same-sex marriage in all walks of life. Perhaps it’s difficult for many Australians to find in our collective DNA the will to be happy for one another.
- Steve Dow is a Melbourne-born, Sydney based arts writer.
