Book review: Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing, Robert Dessaix, ed (1993)

I bought this near the end of this year in a Nowra second-hand bookstore.

This book could never be published in this form today. Like David Malouf’s ‘Antipodes’ which came out in 1985, explicit paedophilia makes Dessaix’s book completely incompatible with 21st century mores and laws. I do not think that he could have predicted the way that attitudes toward sexuality developed as the millennium turned and information began to flow out of the murky recesses of various churches and from the remoter regions of the internet.

Despite such misgivings, Dessaix’s book is more than just worth reading today, and should remind us of the recent – and not-so-recent – past and of the burden that that past still places upon people living. Because of certain biases implanted in religious codes by certain early Fathers many are forced to deal with a legacy of unwarranted shame but reading some of the stories in this book it’s clear how far we’ve come. The generally censorious attitude, with respect to sexuality and gender, of the generation that came before the Boomers – the latter of whom doing more than any generation since the 19th century to renovate morality – are now, for the main, buried in the fringes (as the marriage equality plebiscite showed) or else in the pages of books like this one. 

If anything should remind us of what is right, it’s the pieces – poems, extracts from novels, short stories – in this book. Where one injustice was so burdensome it’s hardly surprising that other levels of propriety should be questioned, even though, in the end, such avenues turned into dead ends. What we see as logical now was less so at a time because, as Dennis Altman explains in The Comfort of Men (1993), the counterculture was, itself, emergent:

[Ted] was a keen swimmer, played squash, still something of a novelty in the early 1960s, belonged to an amateur dramatic society, went bushwalking and even to local chamber music concerts. People like Ted now go to cafes rather than pubs, watch home videos rather than join societies, and buy take-away food or go to restaurants, of which there were then very few. Apart from the hotel dining rooms, there existed several coffee lounges, of which Helen’s was the most genteel, and two Chinese restaurants, one of them in the suburbs. Even for those who, like Ted, lived alone, eating out was something regarded as a special occasion, rather than, as is now the case, taken for granted.

The problem with the novel from which the above extract was taken is that Gerald – who is in love with Ted (but who is not the narrator) – met Ted when he (Gerald) was a schoolboy cruising for cash after classes ended for the day. Elizabeth Jolley toys with similar ideas in her novel Miss Peabody’s Inheritance (1983), from which there’s also an extract here. The boundaries exposed by the narratives start to break down but those who take the time to pick up Dessaix’s book and spend time with it will see sections of society at the roots of the counterculture that are today described in news reports. 

The work of such writers as Sumner Locke Eliott, Elizabeth Jolley, Mary Fallon, Rae Desmond Jones, and Jenny Pausacker allow us to reach, in our imaginations, back into history. Just as the 1960s were “historically” relevant in the 1990s (when Dessaix’s book was published), nowadays the 1990s are similarly grounded as an artefact of memory, something to be dissected and appraised according to contemporary standards, not to be emulated blindly as being somehow being more “authentic” than us. In the straightjacket of space-time fictional characters are Houdini figures, material for the stories the destiny of which is to become passports for a new generation.