The Candidates: Part 1

Sometimes, in fact many times, I have been known to seek revenge. The desperate need for vindication and the unmistakable feeling that, yet again, someone has misinterpreted my genuine gifts of skill, support, caring and goodwill as weakness ... things to be fingered—sharply and abruptly. Abused.

There's a theme peddling furiously along the bicycle path that is my journey through life at the moment ... and it's called Self Interest. Selfishness. "Me! Me! Me! Me at all costs! ... including yours." The "Fuck your needs! What about ME!" Broadway-esque showtune in G Major, performed with almost monotonous regularity by people I always imagined might have known better.

At the many and various times my feet have slipped off the pedals, I have always slowly regained my balance ... accompanied by that familiar voice in my head, howling me down for being "so fucking nice and understanding and helpful and generous ALL THE TIME": reminding me cursorily that people really only ever really care about themselves ... that when push comes to shove, black to white, Labor to Liberal, gay to straight, and broke to flush ... people will put their needs first. Always.

So why haven't (and can't) I?

It's a complex equation. It's symptomatic of being a nice, well-meaning, genuine, caring kind of a guy. I was brought up to be. There was always plenty of everything in our home ... and apart from the occasional religion-inspired fracas, the ebb and flow of daily life throughout my childhood was practically effortless. Simple. And fair. Incredibly fair.

The further you depart from valuing and holding to fairness and equality in your life, the greater the perils you face. As systematically, people placed their own needs somewhere much higher on the hierarchy of needs than mine (or the needs of those I represented) I began to realise that there was a fatal flaw in my persona. I became, almost by default, persona non-grata. I blindingly assumed that it would all work out in the end ... that they would see the error of their ways and embrace my contribution and meaning with respect and appreciation. That they would stop using my seemingly never-ending supply of capability. My skills. My Goodwill. My Support. My Cash. And My Creativity.

The mind fuck has always been in the wash-up. On a number of occasions over recent years, the actuality of an experience has been devastated as a direct result of the actions of almost impossibly selfish and self-interested people. Their power over me has always been what they offer(ed): knowledge, experience, adventure, achievement, excitement, a contribution to our society and our culture, validation ... and the payment of a modest invoice at the end of it all. Or not.

Over the past two years I have walked away from a number of experiences completely fucked over. Ruthlessly and rigorously bruised. Insulted. Offended. And almost broke. There has been the kindness of near-perfect strangers who have helped me up and set me right. They, too, will get theirs.

Am I bitter? Quite possibly ... I will let you be the judge. But in the meantime ... there's a couple of stories I would like to share with you.

Madness

David Walliams plays a character in the television series Little Britain who walks through scenes making 'boock boock' noises ... clucking noises ... like a chicken. 'She' is one of the least sentimental characters in what is most certainly one of the bleakest of scenarios in the show ... and I have always been curious about the likely motivations for her inclusion - but no more so than this afternoon, when, on my way to the office with my takeaway coffee, a woman was walking along behind me making identical sounds. I glanced over my shoulder to see whether someone was taking the piss, as it were ... but no. Here, on Chapel Street (the very epicentre of Melbourne's Fashionista set and an almost impossibly ironic choice of location), was a woman as mad as the day is long, clucking away while strolling along the footpath.

Our little gaggle of pedestrians arrived at a set a traffic lights and a Little Red Walking Man. Others, perhaps as bemused and bewildered as I, moved out of her way. Some struck a pose of airhead aloofness ... others giggled. I looked on with a sanctimonious, self-rightedness pity. As the Little Red Walking Man was replaced by a Little Green Walking Man, we all stood completely still. Mad Woman glanced briefly from the middle-distance surrounding her to the ground and said "I hate going first". As I stepped from the footpath onto the road, Mad Woman followed and began to cluck away again.

My thought, as I wandered down a side-street toward my office was: "There, but for the grace of God, go I."

****

Madness has always fascinated me. A large number of characters in plays I have written could quite easily, if not a little too lazily, be described as 'Mad'. I wrote a play many years ago called Memories, Melodies and Madness which enjoyed a world premiere in London (and great reviews!) and a season in Melbourne.

In the play, four dead women relive the final night of their lives and, guided and encouraged by a Virgil character, are given the opportunity to take responsibility for each of their roles in their shared tragedy and cross over to the Afterlife. One of the characters succeeds. The others do not ... and for them, their fate is to continue to re-live the final night until they are at peace with their responsibility for what occurred. As the character who was finally at peace began to cross-over into her new life, the play began again - playing identically to the way the performance had started. It was my interpretation of the Catholic 'Purgatory' ... the Christians' 'Hell'.

In London, it received rave reviews and played to packed houses. In Melbourne, at the height of an unseasonal Melbourne heatwave (such is my fucking luck!) we had to cancel several performances due to the fact that the old theatre we were performing in had no air-conditioning which resulted in a temperature in the back few rows of raked seating of close to 40°C.

At the conclusion of one performance, as the play 'began again', a woman in the audience suddenly realised what was happening. She let loose with an audible gasp of recognition and an almost painful whimper of realisation ... as the lights snapped to black. She sat in her seat in the theatre for almost half an hour after the performance had ended ... staring at the stage. The rest of the audience had long since left and she remained - at one with the work and her experience of it.

I have been incredibly fortunate to experience a number of moments like this throughout the many years I spent making theatre. There was the young man who, upon seeing my play The World ... According to Timothy Cross promptly returned to another performance with his Mum, having gone home and 'come out' to her. He brought his Mum to see my play because he believed that the experience of it would be something that would inform her understanding of who her son was ... and what he was going through.

****

At some point in the not too distant past, something else came to mean something more to me than the collection of these experiences I was proudly gathering to keep my heart and soul fed and at peace.

I wish I knew what it was.

The Mother of Distraction

"Son ... don't just be a Reactionary," my Mother once quietly hoped of me. She caught me off-guard, as she so habitually did with that spooky maternal instinct of hers. I remember being quite taken aback at the time - so much so that I neglected to ask her to detail her apprehension and promptly returned to the baseless, grandiose, sweeping generalisation I was more than likely making at the expense of some poor hapless over-achiever.

It is 1980. The Games of the XXII Olympiad in Moscow. I am 16 ... and I am devoted to the gymnastics. Or to be more precise, the Gymnasts. The male Gymnasts - who are (to borrow a whorey old chestnut) poetry in motion. Beautiful men. Graceful, agile and strong. Focussed. Humble. Determined. Elegant. Our television is my pimp - and no price is too high. I am introduced to Infatuation. I try not to be obvious and (possibly a little too casually) tear myself away to the kitchen for a snack. Commentary connects us. And I am already saturated by their perfection. My Mother's sing-song voice interrupts my reverie:

"Your Gymnast is on!"

Fuck!

*****

It is 1987. I am 23. I have moved out of home and have visited my Mother at our family home. She is walking me to my car.

"Have you got anyone special in your life at the moment, Son?"

"No Mum."

A pause at the end of the driveway.

"Well, when you do, I hope you won't feel uncomfortable about bringing her home to meet us." ... (Beat) ... "Or him."

Jesus!

How the fuck does she know? Not even I know for sure yet!

*****

It is 1992. I am 28. I own a gay newspaper - Brother Sister - and The Australian Opera are staging their brilliant new production of The Mikado in the State Theatre in the Victorian Arts Centre. It is being conducted by a newcomer - Simone Young. My Mother was in a production of The Mikado many years ago, before asthma claimed her ability to sustain her breath in song. I accepted the Australian Opera's invitation to the opening night performance ... and, of course, I took my Mother. We dressed up. I went to the box office to collect our tickets. Which weren't there. Anywhere. My Mother looked on nervously. Embarrassed.

I have embarrassed My Mother ... who is resolutely standing beside me, her now possibly hopelessly deluded son, in the foyer of The State Theatre and my tickets are not there. I don't exist. The foyer is emptying. The final bell is ringing - endlessly. The ushers are cheerfully anticipating their cigarette break. My profound and stomach-churning embarrassment is confused by this newfound murderous capability: if I had had a gun I would have reached for it.

"I'm sorry Mr Williams, but there are no tickets here for you."

Impotency. Failure. I am introduced to a hatred of fatuous poofs.

My Mother can't stand it anymore. Sensibly, as always, she suggests we leave. I see the sadness of resignation in her eyes and my heart breaks. I know, because I hear it. And feel it. We start to walk away, and as soon as we are a respectable distance from the box office, I touch my Mother's arm and ask her to wait a minute. I am introduced to Fury ... and She's demanding Her say. I walk back to the box office and face the tired gaggle of thieving little jobbers behind the counter before I slam my business card down on their shiny black counter.

"I am going to bury this fucking production!" falls from my mouth like an axe.

They scramble for the business card. I cover it with my hand - a slam so intense my hand stings.

"And in less than a week, every faggot in this town is going to despise this fucking tin-pot testimony to artlessness in precisely the same way that I do now - and for precisely the same reason. You see that woman over there you have humiliated this evening? That is my fucking Mother!"

I lift my hand to reveal my business card, turn and walk away. My Mother is desperately searching for that hole in the floor she wished had appeared ten minutes ago.

I stride up to her like a dismemembered knight. Forcing a wan and forlorn smile. How else do you acknowledge this level of defeat?

"Excuse me ... Mr Williams?"

I think about not stopping. I've already composed the opening paragraph of what will be a full page article - page 3 I think - carefully and studiously dissecting The Australian Opera's rampant homophobia. Where, I find myself wondering, would the company be if it weren't for faggots? Would it even exist? Of course not.

My Mother puts her hand on my arm, and together, we turn. Racing across the foyer is a very, very concerned man. And flapping about in his waving hands are what I immediately recognise as theatre tickets. He offers them to me with trembling hands.

"Mr Williams, please accept our apologies."

"Shove your tickets up your arse!" I spit. "I've practically spell-checked this fucking article!"

Almost in spite of herself, my Mother laughs. Here is the boy she imagined she came to the Opera with.

"You're fucked! This whole fucking company is fucked!

His eyes plead. The tickets are offered again. I turn to my Mother.

"Do you want to see it?"

"Has it started?" she asks - with the timing and instinct I've always admired. And tried to emulate.

The poor hapless messenger panics and practically pirouettes back to the box office. Heads shake and bad hair-dos fall further apart. He turns back to us from his safe space, furiously shaking his head ... and as he trips over himself, my Mother and I (less than a little reluctantly) accompany him to Door 1. He escorts us down the stairs. The Houselights are at half. It's H Row. Right in the middle. And knowing as much as I did at the time about ticketing protocol, they were the seats the Director and his vain little sycophantic oxygen thieving partner might have been sitting in.

"It's a female conductor!" my Mother marvels as the domes introduce us to Simone Young for the first time. And we are away.

At interval, the company's publicist spots us and invites us to the VIP Room for champagne. We accent the buzz about the production, which is very good, and more importantly, my Mother is having the time of her life. As she leaves us to go to the bathroom, the publicist seizes her opportunity to apologise, very discreetly, for the "problem" with my tickets. There is no sign of my Mother returning, so I, too, seize my opportunity to, equally as discreetly, respond by saying that the greatest disservice that has been done to my Mother and I this evening is that it has made this sparkling new production of The Mikado rather impossible to truly enjoy. Or review. So I won't be.

And I didn't.

And up until this day, other than my exclusive and wonderfully candid interview with Simone Young for homo, I have never written a word about the Australian Opera. They, in mind - and much like the tickets that were to be under my name - didn't and don't exist.

*****

It is 1993. I am 29. Robert Chuter is seducing Melbourne with his promenade production of Julia Britton's An Indian Summer in the grounds of Rippon Lea. I still own a gay newspaper, but I am now also a Publicist. A well-connected fag about town. I have some clout ... and I also have a group booking: friends, clients, a couple of heavy-hitters ... and my boyfriend. Scattered around my blankets, it's champagne, fresh fruit, names, picnics and faces for days. I invite my Mother. She doesn't think my Father would like to come ... which is just as well, I say ... because he's not invited. He drops her off outside the gates. She has her folding chair, her blanket and her picnic in an all too-familiar tupperware container. I don't recall much about the performance ... but my Mother was entranced and enchanting! As one with her clever son. My friends adored her ... and all night, her eyes sparkled with delight.

It is a sight I will never forget ... and one I have rarely witnessed since. Our tragedy. My responsibility ... but not entirely my fault. It's one of the aspects of being brought up in a trenchantly Christian household I still resent so completely: the subjugation of women. "The Wife and Mother" as sole purpose, not context. Silenced to circumstance.

But that, as they say, is another story. Right now, I think I need to take my Mother to the opera. In Sydney. And pay for the flight, the accommodation and the fucking tickets! The Sheraton on The Park for a night or two I think. Don't you?

Image: Aleksandr Dityatin. Moscow, 24 July 1980. Games of the XXII Olympiad. Aleksandr Dityatin of the Soviet Union, gold medallist of the individual all-round competition, at the medal ceremony.

Waves of distraction

After a brief but intense conversation with myself yesterday, I've decided that the essential purpose of my blog is to be A Journal. 'What', 'Who', 'Where' and 'When' as opposed to 'Why'. At least some of the time. I'm a little fatigued by the obsession. It's like the beginning of every love-affair, when you disappear into bed for days ... weeks ... 'making' love, kissing, holding, believing again - unquestionably - in the power of intimacy. The whisper of breath on your neck ... and the blissful ignorance of the rest of the world and all the people you knew and loved in it. Quick showers and endless embraces. The stomach is empty ... but the soul is full. And the soundtrack is Mahler. Eating, drinking, and any and every thing else become ad breaks in the 'end-of-season cliffhanger' of So, This Is Love.

Until one day, you realise you've lost the remote and you're stuck 'on' Ten. Seriously. The days of hungry embellishment become minutes of interminable obligation. The breath on your neck stinks. You run out of toothpaste. The voice cracks concrete and comes not only in another language but also from another room. The smile is toothless. The conversation is secondhand. The silence is preferable. The intimacy is acidic and the simplicity is complicated. The soundtrack is Trance. You're on SBS.

My parents called me yesterday ... our annual Easter catch-up. It goes like this: my Father tells me that the Uniting Church has decided to defend itself from the 'pressure of the gay and lesbian lobby'. "Well it's about time Daddy", I say ... without a hint of sarcasm. I am the archetypal son of a Preacher Man. It's the reason I over-react - the fatal flaw in my otherwise hopeful persona. I engage with the sentiment for two reasons: 1) I agree with, and encourage, him completely; and 2) he'll eventually put my Mother on. He and I politely ignore the fact that the chicken's a bit pink. She and I share dessert.

Maternal guidance is a quiet thing. Dads are the song and dance. Mums are the phrasing.

"Hello Geoffrey. Have you been behaving yourself?"

"Yes I have actually ... perfectly."

"Oh, what a shame. Why?"

Phwoomp. Harpooned. Again. She's famous for it ... and it's one of the things I love about her the most. Like the time she put "Cunt" on the Scrabble board and, in response to my seizure, my sister's plain-faced horror and my father's hotpot of shock, adoration and laughter, she brightly - if not somewhat rhetorically - asked: "Well, that's a word, isn't it?"

It was time to play hard. Sydney hard. It's the only way to begin to defy Mother's rather all too-clearly articulated disappointment.


The destination: Tamarama Surf Life Saving Club. The occasion: The world premiere screening of The Inaugural Surf Life Saving Association 2007 Sydney Gay + Lesbian Mardi Gras Float DVD. The relevance: I had participated (and was duly credited) by helping to dispose of 1,000 beachballs into the crowd along the parade route. The reason: Surely it's obvious.

I need to get 'off the grid' more often.

And I will write more about this wonderful evening when I stop catching sight of huge black fourteen legged spiders crawling from all directions toward my keyboard.

In the meantime ...

Stopping All Stations

Easter is such a problem. For the small business operator, it's long enough to be a 'shut down' and short enough to be a real nuisance. "We'll be 'looking at', 'thinking about', 'responding to that' after Easter" ... "That invoice won't be paid until after Easter" ... . As a child growing up in an unforgivably Christian household, Easter was a real mind-fuck. It was impossibly bleak. Shops would shut ... and gloom and doom would descend on our, otherwise, perfectly happy household. It was a veritable tsunami of interminable guilt and suffering (Friday), reverent anticipation (Saturday) and strident rejoicing (Sunday). For the Recovering Christian, Easter remains a heady mix of ingrained duty and obligation ... and like many of the rituals I still associate with the practice of Christianity, essentially one of messy contradictions. Well might the rock have been rolled away, but the Easter Eggs were (and still are) always scarce.

My father was, and still is, a preacher in the High Methodist tradition. He was also responsible for the Easter Candlelight Prayer Vigil at our local church ... and every year, my faith-full Dad would draw up a roster of believers who would take it in turns to sit at the altar of our little church to ensure the single candle (symbolising our spiritual accompaniment of Jesus on the journey to his crucifixion - 'The (fourteen) Stations of The Cross') never went out. The vigil would start at 8pm on Thursday evening and end at about 9am on Friday morning when the Minister leading the Good Friday Service would extinguish the candle to symbolise Christ's death ... murder ... passing ... homecoming ... betrayal ... what you will.

My father would spend hours on the phone tending his blueprint. 'So and so' were going away ... 'so and so' were interstate ... 'so and so' would love to, but ... 'so and so' were sorry, but ... and so and so on. One year, he ended up doing four separate shifts at times of the morning that were, for the rest of the congregation, decidedly un-Godly. And while our home was always stressful, tense and complicated for the duration of this thankless task, I envied his devotion.

A short time after I had moved out of home, my mother called to tell me that my father was having great difficulty filling his Candlelight Vigil roster. I was in the thick of therapy and, possibly even writhing around on my bed like Linda Blair's 'Regan', I think I snarled something typically badly-intentioned, blasphemous and entirely lacking in irony like: "Jesus Christ! Is he still peddling that shit?" down the phone. My mother, knowing - as mothers infuriatingly do - that I treated sleeping at night with the same level of contempt as I treated my health generally, thought I may like to offer to help him out by taking the early morning slots ... those times when it was apparently inconvenient for the rest of the congregation to be up. Even though I was in the midst of fanatically despising both of my parents for the dazzling array of sins they had (not, as it turned out) commited throughout my entire childhood, I agreed to call him. After all, 3am was easy for me ... and yes mum, I'll try not to be pissed. Christ!

I rang my Candlelight Prayer Vigil Roster-fatigued father who gratefully accepted my offer to fill in the gaps. I would take over from Him, sorry, him, at 3am and 'accompany Jesus to the cross' until 9am when people would start to arrive for the Good Friday service.

The fourteen 'Stations of the Cross', as documented both in the Christian faith and my father's Easter Candlelight Prayer Vigil Roster, are: 1. Jesus is condemned to death; 2. Jesus receives the cross; 3. Jesus falls the first time; 4. Jesus meets His Mother; 5. Simon of Cyrene carries the cross; 6. Veronica wipes Jesus' face with her veil; 7. Jesus falls the second time; 8. Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem; 9. Jesus falls the third time; 10. Jesus is stripped of His garments; 11. Crucifixion - Jesus is nailed to the cross; 12. Jesus dies on the cross; 13. Jesus' body removed from the cross; and 14. Jesus is laid in the tomb. I was to take over from my father as Jesus fell for the third time and be there in faithful observation until Jesus was laid in the tomb, and the congregation had arrived to worship.

Acts of faith are decidedly loaded undertakings - where that part of the brain that qualifies our actions as meaningful and appropriate to the given circumstances, proves simply incapable of resolving the inverted equations (of which the World Trade Center 2 + 2 = 0 is the quintessential example of our age). But I was acting out my faith for the benefit of my father ... in spite of the fact that the philosophy of John Wesley's Methodism contains more than a generous strain of emotional, psychological and physical child abuse. (Years later, I would include faithfully transcribed details of Wesley's teachings relating to The Child(ren) as material evidence in a submission I was commissioned to write for the Australian Senate Enquiry into the Mandatory Reporting of Child Abuse). And while I certainly do not consider myself an abused child, Mind Fuck Methodism certainly defined the physicalisation and the fractures that will forever mark the complex and demanding relationship I share(d) with the Christian faith in general, and my father specifically.

Arriving at the church remains a striking memory. It was cold. I was early. I was sober. I was drug-free ... and I was rugged up and ready to draw on all of my theatrical reserves and 'do this thing'. It would be easier than television. I thought. My father was very happy to see me ... and for the briefest of moments, as we met at the altar in the flickering candlelight, his faith and my acceptance and understanding of it, was an undeniable reality. The peace and resolve was quite profound. He showed me The Prayer Book, where people had written their requests for prayer. There was the little old lady down the road who was expected to die come the resurrection. And there were others. I was to pray these collective requests ... but more than anything else, I was to be here as keeper of the candle. If it went out, I was to re-light it with a match from the box beside it. I was to be beside Jesus in his hour of need. And with that, my father left ... shortly after which I, of course, immediately fell asleep.

And on this occasion anyway, Christ died on my watch.

I woke only when the lady who had arrived with the floral arrangements was fastidiously (and perhaps intentionally a little too noisly, thank God) attending to her task. Those who know me well will understand how soundly I sleep ... and for how long ... and how hilarious it might have been watching this particular Good Friday service delivered over the prostrate, paralysed, dribbling, snoring and talking body of Geoffrey sprawled - immovable, stranded, inert and unconscious - across the altar. I didn't know where I was and, the momentary disassociation was impacted (with the velocity of an incredibly high speed head on collision between a semi-trailer and a tiny hatchback on a stretch of desolate rural single-lane highway) with fear that I could, for the first time in my life, taste. The candle had gone out.

Pulverised with fear, I very reluctantly looked up. A scattering of people were arriving and there were some already seated. I witnessed this by, not only the almost surgical quality of fluorescent light, but also by the now barely discernible but instantly recognisable flickering light of 'my' candle. Well might I have abandoned Christ in his hour(s) of need, but it would seem that He had chosen not to provide any evidence of it.

In the good Methodist tradition, I expected to be punished when I least expected it. Instead, it would later be confirmed, that the true measure of significance was that I was physically 'there'. 'Popping out to the 7-11 for a late night snack' would have been an indisputable error of Judgement - and consequently impossible to either accept or forgive. Christ's death, on the other hand, was unpreventable - and whether I was asleep or awake, it was the presence of a living (albeit snoring) soul beside the candle that was the quintessential and undeniable truth of this particular ritual. It took me years, however, to get over the embarrassment ... and to be honest, especially writing about it now, I'm not entirely convinced that I have.

In the years since I rejected Christianity and have chosen to live my life, instead, worshipping at the altar of The Almighty Haphazard, there have been moments when it has been impossible to deny the presence of something beyond even the clockwork curiosity of my imagination. There has been more than one occasion when a gentle but determined hand on my shoulder has prevented me from stepping from the footpath into the path of an oncoming car. I have suddenly been inspired to call a friend at the perfect time, and I have spent time on stage buried under dirt in a shallow and very crowded grave.

But my lasting memory of the Easter Candlelight Prayer Vigil is also crowded ... crowded by acceptance, forgiveness, company and precious solitude. And the point at where, while in the tranquil company of Jesus, I was powerless to prevent the most all-consuming, blissfully ignorant and unintentional sleep I have ever had.

Image: Barry Moser's The Crucifixion.