Special Smashwords Edition
Gay
the 10th anniversary collection
Steve Dow
Gay: the tenth anniversary collection
Special Smashwords Edition
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ISBN# 978-1-937387-09-9 (eBook)
Version 2011.11.22
By the same author
All Sorts – a novel about Sydney, books and social media: all they are, all they could be. http://www.facebook.com/all.sorts.book
These neighbours know good old-fashioned books maketh the family. Their book group pores over The Bride Stripped Bare, The Corrections, The Secret and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: the perfect setting for their own lusts, enmities and envies.
Over tea and biscuits and the odd glass of wine, they’ll yarn about whether women need marriage any more, gays getting conservative, and ponder what’s left to shock: mixing up who’s a man and who’s a woman? Tasty!
Steve Dow lives in Sydney, Australia, and works as a journalist. He is also the author of All Sorts. That’s his dog, Oscar. Cover photo by Simon O’Dwyer. This photo by Steven Roe. Steve is on Twitter @dowsteve.
To Big Steve,
and to Phil,
for showing me the way
Gay
the 10th anniversary collection
CONTENTS
Author’s Preface to the New Edition
Pre-party Prologue: Warming Up Mardi Gras through the years
Chapter One: Keitho and Davo the brutal bashing of Keith Hibbins, interview with his partner David Campbell, court case, gay judge’s opinion on finding
Chapter Two: All My Friends Are Getting Married same-sex marriage in Australia and elsewhere – author’s story
Chapter Three: The Year of Living Equally ALP national conference build-up 2011
Chapter Four: The Art of the Gay Apologia Justice Michael Kirby and biological essentialism
Chapter Five: We Are Family Couples Jacqueline Tomlins and Sarah Nichols; Kieran McGregor and Tim Hunter
Chapter Six: Howard’s Nightmare Leesa Meldrum and the fertility fight; IVF specialist John McBain
Chapter Seven: It’s A Spiritual Thing Politics, religion, gay rights
Chapter Eight: When the Pell Tolls Michael Kelly and the Rainbow Sash Movement; George Pell and the dismissed sex abuse allegations
Chapter Nine: The Perils of Pauline Pauline Pantsdown, aka Simon Hunt; Nazism
Chapter Ten: Hooroo, Have You Seen Her? Searching Sylvania Waters for the former One Nation leader
Chapter Eleven: Sequins and Poise Carol Langley investigates Sydney’s drag scene
Chapter Twelve: The Original Bad Boy Ignatius Jones and the road to Mardi Gras
Chapter Thirteen: Out of the Bars and Into the Streets A history of Mardi Gras from 1978 to 1999: Gail Hewison, Ron Austin, Patrick White, Richard Wherrett
Chapter Fourteen: To Dive For Olympic diving gold medallist Matthew Mitcham
Chapter Fifteen: There’s No-One Queerer the former Rugby league star and out actor Ian Roberts
Chapter Sixteen: Written on the Body gay body image, muscle building, steroids, Michelangelo Signorile, body dysmorphia / bigorexia, Alex Karydis, photographer Belinda Mason, Margherita Coppolino
Chapter Seventeen: He Said, She Said Kevin and Jennifer, brain sex and the Family Court, Rachael Wallbank
Chapter Eighteen: The Happy Eunuch Norrie mAy-welby, gender not specified
Chapter Nineteen: When Two Worlds Collide Xaeviean, intersex
Chapter Twenty: The Persistent Challenge of Bisexuality James Dominguez of the Bisexual Alliance
Chapter Twenty-One: We’re Here, We’re Queer…Maybe Rise and fall of queer theory, New York gay scene at the turn of the 20th century
Chapter Twenty-Two: Three Gay Writers Walk Into A Bar… Augusten Burroughs, Edmund White and Armistead Maupin
Chapter Twenty-Three: Magic and Loss John Foster, Robert Dessaix and Timothy Conigrave
Chapter Twenty-Four: Angels and Agnostics Tony Kushner, Angels in America
Chapter Twenty-Five: Gay Writing 101 What is gay writing; Graeme Aitken’s Australian anthology
Chapter Twenty-Six: A Life Less Ordinary David Menadue, AIDS survivor and his memoir Positive, HIV rises in early noughties
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Language of Denial Bareback debate
Chapter Twenty-Eight: I Love You…What’s Your Name Again? Dance parties, drugs and safe sex
Chapter Twenty-Nine: G is for Gone The drug GHB or GBH
Chapter Thirty: Gina and Tina Are Not Your Friends, Dorothy Crystal meth
Chapter Thirty-One: The Right Man Gordian Fulde and life in the St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney emergency department, alcohol and GHB.
GAY AND GAY FRIENDLY ARTY FOLK
Chapter Thirty-Two: The Key of He Rufus Wainwright
Chapter Thirty-Three: Lily’s Revenge Lily Tomlin
Chapter Thirty-Four: Turn for the Tivoli Reg Livermore
Chapter Thirty-Five: Frock and Horror iOTA
Chapter Thirty-Six: Stand Up, Drag Em Out Taylor Mac
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Her True Colours Cyndi Lauper
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Puss and Disco Boots Margaret Cho, Pam Ann
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Law of Attraction Brett Sheehy
Chapter Forty: From Malta with Love Paul Capsis
Chapter Forty-One: Venus in Purrs Meow
Chapter Forty-Two: Au Revoir, Belvoir Neil Armfield
Chapter Forty-Three: Gwen and the Men Tommy Murphy
*
Chapter Forty-Four: And Now, Back to the Newsroom Anton Enus
Chapter Forty-Five: I Can Hear the Drums, Fernando ABBA, Muriel and me
Post-Party Epilogue: Media Gayzing Life with Piers and Miranda, an old-school newsprint sitcom
2011 Postscript Miranda’s Magic Roundabout
Julia, Kevin, Tony, Malcolm: whatever their private thoughts on the matter, in 2011 all were adamant that individuals with matching genitalia and sock drawers be barred from getting married.
In the 10 years since I penned the original essays in this book, some discriminatory laws have been fixed but, while individual states have set up their own partnership registration schemes, there’s a dirty great pothole on the road to equality in Australia: same-sex marriage.
It’s a pretty conservative desire, one would think. I’ve added several new essays to this collection on the queering of connubials.
Radical, no? Well, no.
My big hope is Carl. Carl Katter, gay brother of Queensland independent maverick and newly minted anti-gay villain Bob. So long as siblings are willing to stand up and counter the flatulent wind from Canberra then there is hope. Carl should run for Parliament. OK, there’s not a little self-interest here in a Katter double act: MP Katter in his hat looks hot. Imagine two. No?
If right-wing iconoclasts peppered the landscape in 2001, they’re positively soiling the carbon-challenged earth a decade later. Piers Akerman - see the chapter Media Gayzing - has long since lost relevance, and in his place rose the risible Andrew Bolt.
An enemy of any sort of identity politics, Bolt once penned an argument in his Melbourne (now national) newspaper column that posited he had a couple of gay friends and they didn’t want to get married and so therefore gays shouldn’t get married. I emailed his letters editor, saying: Bolt may consider these gay people his friends, but clearly he doesn’t consider them his equals.
Minutes later, Bolt emailed me directly, saying: How dare you bring my friends into this.
How very dare I indeed. But did I? Definitely no.
In the past decade I’ve been lucky enough as a Sydney-based journalist to interview some friendly, funny, talented and influential gay and gay-friendly folk for The Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald, The Age and The Sunday Age, and have included an entire section of these portraits in Gay called Gay and Gay-Friendly Arty Folk.
Inspired, no? Don’t answer that. Much like the literal title of this book, sometimes you’ve gotta tell it straight.
-Steve Dow, Sydney, November 2011
by Christos Tsiolkas
It was purely an accident that in the same week when Steve Dow and the publishers of Gay gave me the manuscript to read, I also picked up in an op-shop, a tatty, second-hand copy of the novel City of Night by the North American Beat writer John Rechy.
I had first come across Rechy when I was 16 and I’d nervously made my way up the steep stairs of the International Bookshop in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne. The bookshop, run by a socialist co-operative, was full of texts by Marx and Lenin as well as whole shelves of books on ecology, on feminism, on anti-racism and anti-colonial struggle. The reason I’d gone into the bookshop was the word Gay on their sign outside on the street. It had literally leapt out at me, fascinating me and repelling me at the same time. Going up the stairs, I felt just like I was entering a porno shop. Once inside, I quickly ascertained where the “gay books” were but I was still too nervous to wander over to that section … even if the only witness was going to be the polite young bearded man behind the counter … it still felt too public a declaration of my own “perversity” … to be seen flicking through books meant for poofters. This was back then.
Instead, I picked up in the rich second-hand section of the bookshop a copy of John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw and, making sure that the book was safely hidden in between two other tomes, probably something Marxist, probably something from the English literary canon, I made my way to the counter and without looking at the young man, wishing I could just disappear, fearing I would only see contempt in the man’s face, I paid my money and darted out of the shop. And so began my study of sexual politics.
I was lucky.
The Sexual Outlaw was a damn fine book, with enough description of sex to keep me up at night, as well as essays on politics, on sex, and on power as understood by an author who was born into a working-class Mexican family in the United States, and who had made his way to the big cities of Los Angeles and New York to be a hustler and a writer. He tells that story in City of Night. It’s a good story, about what it’s like to be a rebel and poor and a poofter in a time when having sex with a man was illegal as well as deemed immoral, when it was “clearly” embedded in the economics of class and prostitution. Rechy’s writing is sometimes clumsy or lazy, but that’s the Beats for you. It’s often lyrical too, and fast and hot. That he’s not been anointed into the Beat canon could possibly have something to do with the fact that his sexuality is not “sufficiently” shielded by heroin use or by mystical Buddhism. Or am I just being paranoid?
City of Night was written in 1965. That’s the year I was born.
Reading Steve Dow’s book Gay I realise that 1965 is a long time ago. Dow is a journalist and the book in your hand is a very fine piece of dramatic journalist writing. That’s something we don’t have enough of in this country. Maybe that’s a residue of the colonial past. I’m all for novels, for fiction, but what you don’t get from fiction is the heady direct sense of contemporary time and space, the rush of being engaged in a dialogue or a conversation or even a fight about what matters in this mad world of politics and pop.
Reading fiction, I abstain from this world, for an hour, an evening, a week, and I enter another world, an imaginary one created by the writer. Not so when I read Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris or Mailer’s Armies of the Night. Or writing by Oriana Fallaci, Christopher Hitchens, Joan Didion or Pauline Kael. I’m swept up in the turbulence of injustice and struggle in the here-and-now when I read a great book such as Cold New Worlds, William Finnegan’s excellent and passionate piece of reportage about youth and unemployment in the United States. I can’t disappear after such a read … I have to confront the similarities to my own world, I have to confront my own prejudices and complicities. In reading the best of journalism you encounter perspectives, facts and ideas that shed light on your own life and struggles. I’m prepared to disagree, to fight over those ideas, to be moved by them and to be challenged by them. I need that from writing. Maybe at this current moment, when our magazines and newspapers in Australia are full of features on lifestyles and home decorations, full of solipsistic opinion columns, maybe we need it even more than we know.
I don’t agree with everything Dow writes … probably we don’t even agree on what the word in the book’s title means. Not precisely. But this book sketches and illuminates what homosexual life is like in Australia after more than a quarter of a century of “gay rights”. It’s a weird mixed-up world out there. I don’t have to ferret through a socialist bookshop to find confirmation of my sexuality any more: I can get it packaged to me by advertising and the media.
But what Dow’s book illustrates is, that though we are a long way from 1965 that doesn’t mean that the political struggles around something called “sexuality” have gone away. (Maybe that’s why it had to be a lefty bookshop that introduced me to “gay”.)
AIDS, outing, drugs, the persistent challenge of bisexuality, all of these are subjects in this book, and maybe what’s changed is that now we can see more clearly that some of the struggles, repressions and hatreds come not only from without but from within. In two chapters dealing with the hyper-masculinisation and streamlining of the “male gay body”, I found myself constantly asking, Why the fuck are we doing this to ourselves? But, of course, what’s important about a book like this, is being reminded that “gay” isn’t a niche, a segment, a ghetto cut off from the rest of society. The “gay” world is broader than that, an interwoven one of course, and so religion and politics and the Prime Minister and the media come in, that’s why they’re in this book, why Dow can’t not write about them.
And there are the heroes, male and female and intersex.
In a nightclub in Canberra, a drunk young woman in her early twenties explains to me why she loved Ridley Scott’s Gladiator so much. “He’s a hero, man. We don’t have any fucking heroes.” For me, one of the most enjoyable aspects of this book are the conversations Dow has with figures as disparate as Pauline Pantsdown, the drag persona of someone so disturbed by racism and injustice, that he created a media-savvy heroine to combat it … as David Menadue, who has been quietly battling homophobia, ignorance and the communal ravages of AIDS … and there’s Alex Karydis and Margherita Coppolino, who won’t let body-fascism and our lingering fears about disability deny them a place at Mardi Gras or in the bedroom. And Xaeviean. The heroic … as heroic as hero Ian Roberts, the actor to be.
That’s far from a small thing, giving us a taste of the heroic in the ordinary, in the day-to-day lives of people.
A favourite voice in Gay is that of a heterosexual woman who lives in the suburb where I spent my teenage years. She could have been my next-door neighbour. Discussing John Howard’s resistance to allowing lesbians and/or single women access to fertility treatments, she says, “Someone should shove a dog up Howard”.
See, it’s not 1965. And it’s not 1982 when I wandered red-faced up those bookshop stairs. Different neighbours, different neighbourhoods now. It’s the changes, the continuities, the breaks and the persistent discord that Gay examines and documents … and always in Dow’s honest, humane voice.
- 2001
WARMING UP
The air is crisp but the rain never arrives, much to the chagrin of the Reverend Fred Nile. Japanese schoolgirls line up and scream at the parade as though its participants are pop stars, and the entrepreneurial do a good line in milk crate sales. Straights seem to predominate in the crowd, girlfriends up on boyfriends’ shoulders. Does the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras make a difference, or does everyone just love a good parade?
It’s Mardi Gras 1998 and I’m standing on the edge of the kerb in Flinders Street. I’ve been here two hours and I’m rather pleased with my vantage point. Being five feet and six inches tall, this is not the easiest situation to find oneself in. The noise is building. The Dykes on Bikes are almost here. I’ve seen them before, but I’m dying to see them again.
Then he arrives. Six feet and two inches tall. Plonking his cardboard box on the ground and standing on it, he’s now six feet ten inches. Mr I’m-Here-For-The-Freak-Show-Straight-Boy. Beer in hand.
I tap him on the shoulder. He turns around.
“Excuse me, I’ve been standing here for two hours.”
And I do my best angry schnauzer.
“I’m just testing the box, mate,” he spits, and turns back.
Then, he bounces upon the balls of his feet. The box rides from side to side. And collapses.
He looks so vulnerable there in the gutter. He narrows his eyes at me. The crowd is applauding.
“That’s karma for you, mate,” says another – I think – straight boy. Maybe they’re not so bad after all.
It’s Mardi Gras 1999, and this time I’m in the parade. I want the Japanese schoolgirls to fawn all over me. I want Fred Nile’s menagerie of freaks to wave their placards in my face. Straight boys falling off cardboard boxes no longer get me excited.
I am a marching boy. I have arrived. I am on the right-hand side in the third of twenty rows, each four-guys wide. We have silver spray-painted crowns of thorns wedged around our heads, homemade wings on our backs, and a torch in each hand. Little white wraps around our tushes.
We’re meant to be angels, but I suspect we look like fairies. We’re marching to the song One Night in Heaven by M People.
We’ve practised this routine 263 times. Or something. You know how everyone is with estimates at Mardi Gras time. A bit silly. News reports the next day will typically quote extraordinary crowd figures, and there will always be a letter writer to The Sydney Morning Herald who will contest the figure, based on an intimate knowledge of the size of Sydney footpaths.
One post-Mardi Gras morning, I heard the news John Howard had been elected Prime Minister and I thought, Don’t be ridiculous.
Anyway, I’m having the time of my life, and it’s just about my turn at the front, when another marching boy falls down in front of me, and starts having seizures. The paramedics race in.
“Keep marching! Keep marching!”
And I step around him in my boots.
Just one moment in my day, yeah
Take me up to a place
So far away in your
Heavenly space
We’re losing the truck that’s playing the music. Can’t hear a damn thing; just copying the boys in front of me.
“Run, run!” we’re told. Forced to make up gaps in the parade.
A marching boy to my left dislocates his shoulder and suddenly disappears.
It’s like we’re being mown down at Gallipoli.
One night, one night in heaven
When you touch me
Circle arms around, back the other way. Squat, squat. Camera flashes firing. A girl friend in the crowd screams my name. I rush out of line to steal a kiss, risking corporal discipline for breaking the formation. Perhaps hoping.
Oh the heat, the heat. Where are those water boys when you need them?
Then we turn the corner. Bright lights beaming down. So this is what the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation stand looks like. The crowd goes wild as we come into view.
There’s Marcia Hines with a microphone. Must buy one of her records.
The lights are bright, hot. But we turn in our best effort, emblazoned by a wattage to rival the adjacent Aussie Stadium.
You light up my life, make me feel so alive.
Oh yeah.
It’s Mardi Gras 2000 and I’m an old married man, having been in a relationship now for, oh, ten months.
My partner’s name is Steve, just like mine, and, actually, we’ve not heard any jokes about this fact. Not any good ones. So we made up our own, apropos the first film we saw together, Austin Powers’s The Spy Who Shagged Me; he calls me Mini Me and I call him Bigger Me.
We’ve decided to watch the parade from the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation stand this year. We’re rather excited; we’ll be seated in comfort, among our own and like-minded, and we’ll get to ogle Rugby League’s Ian Roberts wielding a microphone.
Actually, Big Steve wishes it was Matthew Lloyd up there, but apparently he’s not gay, and nor are any AFL players at all. That hugging they do is just camaraderie, apparently.
And then this guy sits next to us. We’ll call him Doofus.
Doofus is cute in his own self-regarded way. He is muscular – now, you don’t see much of that at Mardi Gras – and tall and he has dark hair and good cheekbones and he keeps taking his shirt off. He has 6 per cent body fat, or so he tells us. Again and again. He has also brought his wife along.
“You guys are cool, you know?” he says, slapping me on the back.
I’m comforted by this news. By his endorsement …
“I don’t care what you guys do, doesn’t bother me at all.”
Bit late if it did, sitting here, I think.
Doofus and his wife are plotting how he can get himself photographed with that drag queen three rows down. There is no shortage of boys around him who want to be in a photograph with Doofus with his shirt off. But what he wants, he says, is the drag queen.
I can’t help thinking, What do you really want, Doofus?
Doofus approaches the drag queen. She gives the obligatory drag queen smile for the camera. All teeth. Doofus looks happy.
I’m a bit sad. He’s back and talking to us again. I shall be berated later for my attitude by my better half, who likes to believe in people’s good intentions.
“I’ve told my kid, don’t be homophobic, that’s what I’ve told her,” says Doofus. He puts his arm around my shoulder and smiles. “You guys are cool, you know?”
Mine might be the love that dare not speak its name, but his is the love that won’t shut up.
We’re trying to hear celebrity lesbian couple Kerryn Phelps and Jackie Stricker hosting the parade as it comes through. Later, Jackie will refuse my request to interview the pair for this book because, she says, they’re writing their own. They will eventually call on the right-wing broadcaster Alan Jones to launch their book. For some reason, he’s not unkind to gays.
Kerryn’s brother Peter, the actor, is standing next to Kerryn in a cowboy hat. Not gay, apparently.
“I’m really enjoying sitting here with you guys.”
Doofus, we learn as we try to take in the parade, is a model, and has been photographed naked. Had we bought the (tacky, lurid) women’s magazine he’d appeared in?
No, not beyond a sneak look in the newsagents a few years ago, I tell him. He falls momentarily silent.
More parade, more wry Mardi Gras wit. It’s thin in the stands, though.
“You know,” says Doofus, his arm hovering over my shoulder again and landing with a thud, “I’m really enjoying the Simon and Simon show.”
Oh, thank goodness. He misheard our names.
Apparently, Doofus has a nude calendar out, but it’s only available overseas. Pity. He promises to send us copies if we’ll give him our address. But – no paper, no pen, we shrug.
“Look, you guys make sure you find me at the party and give me your address, all right?” He says this three times. He has no idea there are going to be 20,000 people at the Fox Studios party. We do not correct him.
I wonder, how many Doofuses are out there in the suburbs? They’re gay-friendly. Perhaps a little too gay-friendly to be merely what they appear. What is their underlying truth?
What is gay, anyway? A pair of wings in Oxford Street? A tab of ecstasy at the Hordern? A complete way of being, but an exclusive club whose door bitch demands total biological- essentialist certainty?
Maybe it’s time to stop theorising and start partying. It might be the most effective way of saying, “We’re here. Get over it.”
- 2001
2011 postscript: The Sydney Star Observer quoted my Gallipoli reference as being in poor taste. Is it dissembling now for me to say I was suggesting Mardi Gras likewise has iconic Australian status? But the good news is Big Steve and I have shared many Mardi Gras parties since; we moved to Sydney in 2002 and have been together almost 13 years.
I volunteered for Mardi Gras in 2005.
Parade working party meetings were held in a dingy Surry Hills fluorescent-lit room. About a dozen or more people sat around a table, occasionally chirping when their leader drew breath.
Under discussion was not what the messages to media should be. Some however suggested journalists must be contained in a “cage” at Taylor Square, and photographers redirected away from hairy bear bare bottoms and dyke tits on trikes.
As the sole journalist sent to help out by Mardi Gras Central, I could see I was in for some fun and they were dying to draw on my wealth of media experience …
once they opened the door, which must have been very thick thus my knocks went unheard ...
and once they slowly emerged from under the table …
Poignantly keen to contribute something, I offered to pioneer the first complete parade guide. Ignoring the handbags that were being drawn to protect the names and party pant sizes of Mardi Gras parade participants, who so seek privacy they dance up one of Sydney’s main thoroughfares, I set about contacting all 80 entries and writing them all up for the gay press liftout.
The parade committee was then being run by a fellow who followed me up the street during the preliminary parade site visit, telling me none of the entrants would want to be identified in a “parade guide”. He would have barely been born in 1978, when the Herald named all the participants arrested at the first Mardi Gras, but he sure identified with that era.
Despite the stonewalling on the parade databank, I eventually got the email addresses of the entrants, and found that in 2005, with the privacy-free Facebook and Twitter still a couple of years away, almost every entrant in the parade responded warmly to my emails and wanted their float details and, in some cases, names in the guide in all their fabulousness.
Except …
A vocal sado-masochistic couple from Brisbane who, having received my email, phoned the Mardi Gras office and left a phone message, which the office asked me to return.
When I did, one of the S&M lads yelled down the phone that they didn’t want inclusion in the bloody guide. How very dare I, etc.
I couldn’t quite work out amid their ranting if they’d withdrawn from the parade or had privacy concerns.
Either way, that was fine, but the phone call was an education: who knew capricious rudeness to Mardi Gras volunteers was part of the leather scene?
I don’t know, I’m guessing here, but perhaps it was the master of the duo who, in his butchest voice, subsequently complained about my telephone intrusion – what most of us would refer to as “returning a call” – to someone at Mardi Gras head office. I can’t imagine what my misdeeds were said to be; it wasn’t as though I had made off with one of their paddles.
Nonetheless, one of the Mardi Gras heavyweights immediately emailed me, telling me I wouldn’t be welcome in Mardi Gras again. Later, informed these S&M boys had been difficult to manage before, the honcho retracted the contents of his hasty email.
I could stay. I was honoured ...
On Mardi Gras night 2005, the heavyweight gave me a quick kiss, which may have been approaching an apology.
Oh, and both those Mardi Gras organisers are now my friends on Facebook. Where nothing’s private.
Along with 65 drag queens. With sharp, photogenic teeth.
I lost touch with Doofus. Has anyone checked Grindr or Scruff?
KEITHO AND DAVO
Keith Hibbins is a tall, rakish boy. Light brown hair, parted and slicked to one side. Freckles, teethy smile. Each lunchtime, he cycles from school back to the house for the main family meal of the day, past the weatherboard homes, through the familiar streets of Maryborough, in western Victoria. He seeks advice from his big sister, Lorna, and little sister, June, on what their mother Merle is cooking, because they’ve eaten earlier. He has a Jack Russell, which barks and jumps to life at home on his approach. The dog’s name? Sheila, of course.
Bill Hibbins is a builder, a child of an orphanage. But he and Merle are determined to give their three children, born in the 1950s, stability and love. So it is no surprise that the boy, Keitho, as he is known, is affectionate, demonstrative. Bright, too. And outgoing. For his ninth birthday he initiates a party and invites his school friends. Then he gets around to telling his mother, who is forced into frantic last minute shopping to cater.
Keitho has the hots for a couple of the guys at high school. He thinks one of them might be gay; the one who cracks the shits when Keitho goes driving with the other. Officially, though, Keitho has girlfriends before he has boyfriends.
If you were tracking fault lines in a common Australian point of view, Maryborough might be one road stop. The town was built on the gold rush. In the 1850s, thousands of diggers, many Chinese and European immigrants, poured into the nearby White Hills. At around the same time, some 75 kilometres south, at Ballarat, some of the same fortune seekers were slaughtered in their droves in the Eureka stockade – some say it was a massacre – and the modern union movement dawned.
By the 1960s Maryborough is, predictably enough, still a stultifying place if you are a little bit different. And Keith Hibbins is certainly that. The town is particularly proud of the native wattles and of gumleaf playing.
Keitho runs his own boisterous race. He matriculates and the country kid comes to the city in the early 70s to study architecture at Melbourne University. Perhaps the campus life speeds up the long coming out process that gay men of his era usually face. He starts dating the daughter of one of his architectural employers, but it just doesn’t work out right.
He has to tell her that he really prefers men. She turns around and tells him that actually, she prefers women.
None of this fazes Keitho. He’s a big party boy. That’s something that’s innate in him, it will be commented upon later by the person who knew him best. His propensity to party should not be considered Keitho’s chosen lifestyle option.
Keitho is a natural-born party animal, all six-foot-one of him. Doesn’t mind a drink.
“Look at that,” says David Campbell, handing me a black and white photograph of a boy aged about 10. Freckly, hair diligently combed and parted to the side, big cheesy grin. Keitho.
“Isn’t that an incredible photograph? Oh, I’ve got photographs of Keitho where he is a real dork! But that photograph, I used to see up his mum’s place when we went up, and it always took my …” he pauses and stumbles over the word, “… h-heart away.”
David Campbell dissolves, and I reach across the table to touch his hand, while I turn the tape recorder off.
We’re sitting in the kitchen of their Edwardian house, the one Keitho redesigned, in Melbourne’s northern inner-city Collingwood. Sleek, 1990s tones, polished timber floors. And Keitho’s coffee machine. David Campbell is learning to master an espresso on his own.
A silver Alessi fruit bowl. Davo would caution Keitho about his penchant for brand names. “You don’t own it,” he would say. “You’re only a custodian.”
We resume taping.
“When I went up to his mum’s place, I just loved that photograph. It’s just so happy, and he’s just so vibrant.
“Later on he was a real lookin’ dork, I mean you wouldn’t bother with it. But I knew that even if I met him then, I would have loved him.”
This assessment includes the picture of Keitho with long wavy hair and 70s brown and beige woolen vest.
What was it about him?
“About Keitho?” says David Campbell, wiping his cheeks, his eyes rounding on me as thought it is an odd question. He looks tired, lined, drawn, and his bald 48-year-old head accentuates that effect.
“I don’t know. A connection. You know, because you love your partner. It’s that connection. I remember meeting him, when I met him the first time. I thought he was somebody else …”
One beer, that’s all David Campbell wants, all he is determined to have. Tonight he is going to behave himself in all senses of the word. He puts enough money in his pocket for one beer and flings his wallet into the glovebox of his ute, and heads into the pub. He’d knocked off work as a self-employed gardener at about 4.30. It is now 6pm. The early November sun is yet to fall over Commercial Road in Melbourne’s inner-south-east; too early for the true bustle to begin along the burgeoning gay mini-mecca.
In the early 80s, long before morphing into a handbaggy nightclub, the Market Hotel is a pub with a friendly rather than faceless façade. David Campbell is 30, knows the gay scene. But has never been in love before. That is about to change.
And then he sees him. That’s his friend Robert, isn’t it? Keith Hibbins, at the bar, waves back. David approaches him and he realises the mistaken identity.
Keitho – for that is what David will come to call him, and in turn be called Davo – is tall and slender, 28, and bearded, with hair already receding. He admits he hadn’t seen who was waving to him; he needs his glasses.
But they talk. And talk. And talk. David thinks, This guy’s great.
They have dinner with Keitho’s friends. And then go to a gay nightclub in beachside St Kilda, Mandate. The pair head back to Keitho’s to stay the night.
For some years, they live in Acland Street, St Kilda. Davo finds it hard to keep up with Keitho’s love of the nightlife. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Monday, even. Davo used to be a big reader, but virtually gives up the habit for a few years after meeting Keitho. He’d happily stay at home and be a hermit, but what he wants more than anything is to be by Keitho’s side.
Keitho always buys Davo a book as a gift. Davo is not a present person, but Keitho loves to mark an occasion.
The sex continues to be filled with passion. Sometimes you can hear Keitho’s orgasms down the other end of Acland Street. He clamps his hand over his lover’s mouth, and they giggle.
Old Mrs Carmel is among their favourite neighbours. “All these men living in the flats and you’re all bachelors,” she says with amazement.
A few queer facts of life are explained to Mrs Carmel.
Still, she loves the boys. One day, she decides to bake Keitho and Davo a plate of sweet pastries to show her affection.
She enters the back door of the apartment, unperturbed by the noise from the lounge room.
There are the two men busy confirming their bachelor status.
Mrs Carmel stands there, face frozen, plate of pastries in hand. “I just made you some piroskies.”
Then there is the drink, of course. If Keitho is bored, or an architectural project has been completed, he will imbibe.
Davo will often pick up Keitho after work when Keitho has had a long lunch. Keitho will stagger towards his partner, whose arms will be folded.
“G’day matey,” he’ll slur. “I love ya.”
Keitho will end up sleeping it off. Davo will sit around, thinking, Well, what am I going to do? But he will never consider going out without him.
Davo grew up a farmer in country Wandin and Yea. He doesn’t know exactly where he was born. He was raised by grandparents and then lived with a teacher’s family. But that is a whole other story.
Keitho and Davo buy a house together in Collingwood in 1992. When they move in, they attempt to dig the garden out. Keitho has about three hits at the green and says, “Oh God, I’m going to make a cup of tea. I’m exhausted.” Leaving Davo to do the work.
As they get older, they stay in a little more. Just a bit. Maybe a trash movie on Friday night, out to the pub Saturday, and a quality video Sunday night, say, a Greenaway film.
On weekends, by the window near the stove in the kitchen that Keitho redesigns, Keitho often presses his little lover against the stove.
“I love ya, Davo.”
And Davo will say, “Ditto.”
Just like in Ghost, which Davo thinks is a stupid movie.
“This is the one I take to bed every night,” says David. Keitho is 40-something, in the right of frame, in front of an upright architectural drawing board.
“He’s doing a plan. He might have been working for Melbourne City Council then; I’m not too sure where I took the photograph.
“Somebody gave me this (small, wooden) picture frame for my birthday. Keitho said, ‘Why did they do that, Davo? You don’t collect photographs.’
“I thought, I know what I’m going to do. So I snapped him at work, and I put it away. I hid it.
“And then when he died I found it. Like, I wasn’t even looking for it.
“I never had worn pyjamas in my life. But now I wear pyjamas. And I stick this photo down my pyjama top when I go to sleep at night.
“I talk to it then, and I talk to it in the morning, and I kiss it.”
The Fitzroy Gardens are located in East Melbourne, buttressing the central business district and comprising the equivalent of several city blocks. Keitho, now 45 and slower after an accidental fall left him with metal pins in his arms and in his legs, and Davo, 47, would often cut through the gardens to get to the city, to buy a book perhaps.
Sometimes on a Saturday morning, they would call in at the teller-machine at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute, west of the gardens, rather than walk around the corner into Smith Street, Collingwood, which is now swamped with cruising junkies. They never felt safe using an automatic teller in their neighbourhood.
On the night of Sunday, April 25, 1999, Anzac Day, Keitho and Davo decide to head for the Peter Mac bank-teller.
They’d spent the day in country Marysville in north-eastern Victoria, visited the falls. Now, this was a remarkable day; in previous years when he’d visit Marysville alone, Davo would feel an indescribable depression. A sad foreboding, a feeling of doom.
But going there with Keitho, the day is perfect, the falls beautiful. They’d called in at a winery. Davo had bought Keitho a choice red. The dresses the women wore serving them at the winery had etched themselves into Davo’s mind, and he’s not normally a person for great recall. Later, parrots had walked across their feet in the sunshine.
Home in Melbourne, Davo decides he needs olive oil, which they normally purchase in inner-northern Brunswick. So they head to the bank teller in the car.
Being the Anzac Day holiday, a football match is playing at the MCG, and the cars are taking up the car parks everywhere. So instead of pulling up near the teller, Keitho and Davo are forced to park the Volkswagen pollo further out.
On the way back to the car, Davo says, “Oh, let’s go and look at the possums.” In the familiar, lush park.
Keitho and Davo never get to see the possums.
Instead, they meet two straight blokes, John Whiteside, a 28 year-old air conditioning mechanic, and Kristian Peter Dieber, a 24 year-old economics graduate, who are running frantically across the grass.
Whiteside and Dieber run up to Keitho and Davo, enraged because they have met a woman who says she was raped in the park.
Whiteside, the bigger of the two, seems the controller. The blond-haired Dieber runs on, and Whiteside calls him back to the site where they’ve encountered Keith Hibbins and David Campbell. Whiteside screams and carries on. Dieber follows suit.
Whiteside and Dieber both reek of alcohol. They have been drinking with friends at the nearby MCG Hotel. Their friends are on the other side of the park, comforting Evgenia Tsionis, the woman who claims to have been raped ... falsely, it will turn out; she was drunk and stoned and had had an argument with her boyfriend, who had dumped her on the edge of the park.
Whiteside and Dieber have not the faintest idea what the rapists they are looking for actually look like.
David Campbell mishears them. He’s half-deaf in one ear. He thinks they are looking for a rapist, as in singular.
Keitho asks why they are so aggressive. Davo cannot hear the full conversation.
Keitho senses their hostility. Thinks they are gay bashers.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Keitho shouts. “Run!”
So Davo and Keitho run back to Lansdowne Street, back to the Peter Mac.
Davo is pushed to the ground. Feels a boot to his head, another to his hip and leg.
“I’m going to fuckin’ kill you!” Davo thinks — he can’t swear — that it’s Whiteside that says this.
“Leave him alone!” Keitho. Definitely.
Whiteside and Dieber round on Keitho, who runs away on an angle, rather than back to the lights and safety where Davo runs.
With all that metal inside him, Keitho runs like a tin man.
From the seventh floor of the Peter Mac, Beverley Skinner, who is taking a break from caring for her dying husband, gazes down into the park.
She sees Whiteside pin Keitho against a parked car. Several cars pass by. No-one stops.
These are some of the words she will later use to describe Whiteside “just punching the crap out of him”:
“He was using fists and elbows … he wouldn’t stop for no-one. It was an outrage. He was a bloody animal. Savage.”
Dieber holds Keitho by the shoulders, restraining Keitho from fighting back as Whiteside delivers blow after blow to the head.
Beverley Skinner sees Keitho slide to the ground. That is where Whiteside and Dieber leave him.
“We went to Port Arlington once,” says David. “And we booked into this room and, after we’d christened the room, we went to the bar.
“I always touched Keitho. And he said, ‘Davo, we’re not in a gay pub now.’
“We couldn’t get enough of each other. Even when I was angry or he was angry at something that might have been done or said. Our arguments would last only an hour maybe at the most.
“We were always sorry after we’d had an argument, but it was almost always over trivial things.”
David asks me when did I meet my partner. I was hoping he wouldn’t ask me that. I’ve had the terrible realisation that it was on April 24, 1999.
The day before David Campbell’s partner was beaten senseless.
“It’s OK. OK. That’s OK. There’s nothing to be …” He pauses.
Keitho has not regained consciousness.
They say he’s going to be OK, lying there bruised and battered in St Vincent’s Hospital. The police, the doctors.
Then everyone starts getting gloomy.
“Even if he survives, he’ll be just as happy as a cricket,” says the pastoral care worker.
Davo goes off the deep end. “He’s not a bloody insect.”
Davo swears that at one point Keitho hears his name and turns toward him.
On 6 May, Davo gets a call.
Hurry. He’s going.
Keitho dies in Davo’s arms.
For some days, they put Davo under watch. Won’t even allow him to shower without supervision.
The Office of Public Prosecutions is ecstatic. Justice Philip Cummins has been named the trial judge in the state vs. Whiteside and Dieber, to hear charges of murder.
It is almost like a cheer squad atmosphere.
Woo! Woo! Woo!
“David. This is wonderful.”
Cummins is known as a tough sentencer. Hates violence.
Then plea bargaining enters the picture. Just days before the trial, the game changes. Whiteside and Dieber will answer charges of manslaughter.
They plead guilty.
This means they have elected not to give evidence. This means we will not know what was going on in their minds on the night of April 25.
This means Davo will now never know the answer to some crucial questions about why they killed Keitho.
And then, unexpectedly, with much community outrage, Cummins lets Whiteside and Dieber walk.
On June 23, 2000, having served six months pre-sentence detention, they are released. Cummins sentences each to three years’ jail, but suspends the rest of their sentences.
Cummins addresses the two young men in the dock. They are of good character, he says again and again in his summary.
“No doubt,” he says of Beverley Skinner’s eyewitness account to the assault, “her qualitative description of your conduct was affected by the extreme medical condition of her husband”. He also claims her views were impeded by traffic, and rejects her claim that about 20 blows were struck, though the “factual substance of her evidence is undiminished and persuasive”.
Cummins acknowledges that the defendants tried to shift the blame to Keith Hibbins, the victim, claiming he had thrown the first punch.
But then, he says, “I do not consider that either of you deliberately sought to mislead the police.”
Head trauma, says Cummins, was the cause of Keith Hibbins’s death.
Thus, “the final step in this unfolding tragedy is that the death of the deceased was unexpected, unintended and unlikely”.
Hibbins’s death was not a purposeful bashing of a homosexual. Nor, he says – surprisingly – did he consider Whiteside and Dieber’s conduct to be that of vigilantes avenging a rape, “for vigilante conduct is premeditated, purposive conduct wherein the actor takes the law into his or her own hands having eschewed due process of law”. Nor was it a “crime by aggressive drunken sports followers”.
So what exactly the killing was is not made clear by Cummins. Nor are Whiteside or Dieber vocal about their intentions beyond pre-trial statements to police that they were searching for rapists and that they hit Hibbins in self-defence – this is put seriously – and were only attempting to subdue him. Cummins concludes that the pair acted “without premeditation”.
Before handing Whiteside and Dieber their freedom, Cummins brushes up his Shakespeare. A line from Julius Caesar: “Men at some time are masters of their fates / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves …”
Good quote. Though Cummins himself doesn’t believe it, and the point of using the quotation is obscured: “But you (Whiteside and Dieber) and the victims were under a malevolent star that Anzac night.”
Keith Hibbins died because of a bum astrological star chart, apparently.
Some questions David Campbell must sift through and ponder along with his photographic memories.
Was there any element of gay-hate in the bashing of Keitho?
Why had the Office of Public Prosecutions suddenly swung from being confident about having a murder case to pursuing a manslaughter trial? Was justice for Keitho not worth the pursuit under the risk of a “not guilty” plea by the defendants?
If the victim had been anything other than a gay man, would the tough sentencer Cummins (who subsequently sent an elderly woman to jail for murder after stabbing a fellow elderly nursing home resident to death) have treated Whiteside and Dieber’s sentencing differently?
Cummins, through his associate Nick Cummins, his son, refuses to be interviewed.
“I just firmly believe he [Cummins] gay-bashed us,” says David Campbell.
“He was a gay-basher, a verbal gay-basher.
“I believe that if [the victim] had been a heterosexual male and had children, he would have thrown the weight of the law behind it.”
David has been told that Dieber showed real remorse for his actions.
David feels anger towards Cummins. He feels nothing for Whiteside and Dieber.
“When they had the committal hearing, I had a video link-up because I did not want to see what killed Keitho.
“But when I went to their summations of the outcome at the committal, I actually stood and stared at them. And I felt nothing.
“Isn’t that strange? I would love to be able to hate them. I really would. I really would give anything to be able to hate those two.”
Was the fact that Keitho and Davo were two gay men important in the first instance?
“I think they were looking for rapists,” says David. “I don’t think they were out hunting for gay men.
“But I do believe that Whiteside picked up … or I have a suspicion, that it could have [turned into] a gay hate crime, as the result of looking for one thing, not finding that, all pent up and all this anger at what is supposed to have happened to this woman.
“And then, all of a sudden …
“I don’t know about you, but Keitho and I would, once a month, have someone scream out at us ‘AIDS-carrying faggots’, you know?
“I mean, we were obviously gay. We didn’t walk separately, we walked touching. I mean, straight men don’t walk around with their arms touching each other.
“There is a persona that we generate, and I don’t care … most people know that we’re gay without our even having to say it.
“Something clicked in, either an automatic drive, they had a blood-lust, or it clicked in something else, and it may have been … and I think from Whiteside mainly, because he was the instigator of it all, the controller, I firmly believe that, and Dieber just followed suit so something could have clicked in with him (too) … and bingo, they lost it.”
What do you mean, “clicked in”?
“Well it clicked in that we were gay. Because it doesn’t make sense to me that they were attacking rapists. To me it just doesn’t ring true.”
In his life, strangers have bashed David Campbell five times. The first four times, at least, were because of his sexuality. In the original court case, Whiteside and Dieber’s defence counsel attempted to discredit David’s evidence as unreliable with the bizarre claim he was “phobic” about being beaten up, and this was why he ran.
But in this case he ran because Keitho yelled at him to run.
David doubles over in apparent pain. “I can’t understand why Keitho wouldn’t go to where there was light and safety.
“But he came back, and I heard him yell out, ‘Leave him alone!’ And they let me go for a minute and I was up like a rocket and it must have been adrenaline or whatever and I went through and I looked behind me and the littler one, which was Dieber, was right behind me, and I just sideswiped and I went straight through traffic. I didn’t wait for the traffic to stop. And I got to the other side.
“But Keitho went on an angle. And that angle took him exactly where he was brutalised.”
In what seems record quick time, Cummins’s sentence is appealed by the director of public prosecutions. Justices Winneke, Brooking and Phillips on the Appeals bench share few of Justice Cummins’s perceptions of Whiteside and Dieber’s crime.
John Winneke emphasises the severity of the assault on Keith Hibbins. He reminds the court of what Dr Helen Parker of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine saw when she visited Keitho while he lay unconscious in hospital: injuries to the head, neck, chest and left and right arms.
“The injuries to the neck resulted in extensive bruising over the left side of the neck extending to the angle of the jaw,” says Winneke. “There were three adjoining bruises.” Consistent with punches, the court is told.
Then there is the evidence of a pathologist, Dr Dodd, who said there were “at least six to eight discrete injuries on the head and neck area”. Cummins had rejected Beverley Skinner’s evidence that Keitho was punched at least 20 times.
Adds Winneke, “In the course of their police interviews, the respondents had sought to blame the deceased, Whiteside saying that the deceased had attempted to strike him first, and Dieber suggesting that the deceased had said to him, ‘I’m going to kill you, dobber’. In respect of these statements, his Honour (Cummins) absolved the respondents from lack of remorse.”
His fellow appellant judge Robert Brooking expands on this issue: “Whiteside plainly gave the psychologist, Ms Warren, the impression that he was ‘punching back in self-defence, rather than turning away’ … The respondents advanced to the police a false case of self-defence, which they were still maintaining in June, 2000.”
The appellant judges’ take on the issue is directly at odds with Cummins’s assessment that Whiteside and Dieber did not seek to mislead the police with their claims that a 45-year-old tin man was the violent one.
Brooking agrees with Cummins that both defendants acted without premeditation, but “this was not a single blow struck in anger immediately after the supposed offender was apprehended … both men were out to punish from the moment they gave chase …
“I cannot agree with his Honour that the ‘cruel facts of this case’ made general deterrence an irrelevant consideration; quite the reverse, they made it an important one.”
There is “not a word from the respondents themselves about their own state of sobriety and state of mind and their own roles that night”, says Brooking.
“His Honour described the death as unexpected, unintended and unlikely, a phrase on which the respondent’s counsel relied without, however, analysing it.
“Had death been expected, the respondents would have been guilty of reckless murder. Had death been intended, their crime would have been willful murder.
“As to whether death was ‘unlikely’, the possibility of death would, by one means or another, result from an assault of this kind … was certainly not remote.
“Causing death by administering a vicious beating in concert in order to punish an unofficial suspect, unconvicted, uncharged and not identified by a complainant or by any description for a supposed crime, must be viewed seriously.
“When it turns out, not merely that the victim was entirely innocent, but that the supposed crime had not been committed, the case becomes very striking.”
Whiteside and Dieber received six-year jail sentences on 4 August, 2000. They are appealing the sentences.
I need answers. Justice Phillip Cummins won’t talk to me. I want to put things to him: How does he know so certainly that there was no element of gay hate? Would he have treated a different type of victim differently?
His associate – his son – returns my first telephone call, and says the Justice does not give interviews about decisions. Nick Cummins does not return a subsequent call.
I telephone someone suggested by another journalist. The man I am calling is a senior Victorian judge. He is of a certain age. He is a chum of Philip Cummins (“Phil”). They have lunches and dinners together.
He is also gay. I will not record his name here. He is not officially out in his profession.
We speak a couple of times, but this man is in traffic with his little dog jumping all over him. I telephone him again.
Explain Philip Cummins to me, I say.
“He’s generally a harsh sentencer,” says this man, who is generous with his time.
“He has a reputation for being fairly heavy with his sentences.
“But when a fellow pleads – and those two pleaded guilty to manslaughter – the Crown is not obliged to present live witnesses.
“It is sufficient for the Crown to sustain the conviction and the ingredients of the defence. And thus you get a fairly truncated offence because it often launders the offence of those real horrors.”
Yes, but there was lots of evidence about the severity of the crime presented before Cummins.
“I must say it was a surprising deviation from Phil’s usual sentencing practice.”
What if this had been a straight, married man beaten to death?
“There’s one thing you can say about Phil, that there’s not a shred of homophobia about him.
“He’s absolutely immune from prejudice. If anything, he’s tolerant and understanding. Tolerance, well, I wouldn’t even use that word because it denotes a hint of patronage.
“Whatever can be said about this … [that Cummins] has gone off the rails or whatever … you can’t say he has a shred of homophobia about him.
“As a gay person, I’m telling you I know him terribly, terribly well, and that’s absolutely not [part of his views].
“In the judiciary there’s an awful lot of bigotry and attitudes, but he’s not one of them. He’s not bigoted religiously or in terms of class or sexual orientation or colour.”