Teaching Notes for High School Sodomy

It’s late October. The Coalition for Marriage has a problem airing a television commercial supporting the No vote in the same-sex-marriage survey. The commercial has been classified as MA 15+ by Free TV Australia. Because of its sexual explicitness it will only be viewable after 8.30 p.m. The words that offended were taken from the Safe Schools teaching materials and are classroom language for eleven-to-thirteen-year-olds in schools using the program: “It’s a total lie that all guys have dicks and all girls have vaginas” and “Penis-in-vagina sex is not the only sex and certainly not the ultimate sex.” Theatre isn’t covered by the television censors or the federal government’s Classification Board, which covers film and computer games, and nobody complained in 2007 or again in 2013 when secondary students were taken to a play which instructed them in homosexual sodomy—“the ultimate sex” Safe Schools endorses?

Preparing for reading and seeing the play, students were taught that the gay text they were studying was “one of Australia’s great love stories”.

The first part of the play is comedy. On stage a 1980s gay activist praises sodomy for its political superiority: “Men being intimate or penetrated challenges the patriarchy.” Remember, this is teacher-authorised classroom language and sexual indoctrination. Tim, played by a good-looking young actor, talks of being sodomised: “One more thing, my bum wouldn’t close and the cum kept dribbling out for about half an hour.” After the expected audience laughter subsides his friend helpfully explains, “Your sphincter was probably in shock. It’ll get used to it.” Cue more laughter. In the book, which is probably in school libraries, he also says, “It’s worth it, because when it works it’s mind blowing.”

The second part of the play is tragedy. Tim and his lover John die of AIDS. It’s touching and on many nights the audiences sobbed and rose to their feet, though perhaps a minority remained seated, offended by the manipulation.

Holding the Man, a memoir by Tim Conigrave, was published in 1995—only months after the author died. The book was adapted for the stage by playwright Tommy Murphy and his play is award-winning, mainstream-subsidised theatre. It won an AWGIE Stage Award, the New South Wales Premier’s Play Award and the Philip Parsons Young Playwrights Award. The play text, published by Currency Press, is taught in schools and recommended for community groups.

After the original Griffin Theatre production in Sydney in 2006 the play was performed at Belvoir theatre and La Boite in Brisbane. Both the latter subsidised theatres commissioned teachers’ notes for use with secondary school audiences. Neither of these documents indicate the age of the school children they were prepared for and nowhere is there any advice for teachers on the age of the students the play was suitable for—perhaps they relied on teacher discretion. The film version is classified MA 15+.

Murphy’s stage adaptation is a fairly straightforward cut-and-paste from Conigrave’s text. Conigrave had trained as an actor and he told his story by linking dialogue-heavy scenes as if following a point-form plan through his life. Murphy introduces some larger-than-life puppets for the performance, which seem no more than unnecessary decoration. A cover quote on the latest edition of the book, a film-tie-in edition, assures us it is “A monumentally loved book … an Australian classic.” Murphy had not actually read the book until he was contracted to turn it into a play.

Conigrave wrote in the last period of his short life. He recounts the love affair between himself and John Caleo. They met at school, became lovers, and lived on and off with each other for fifteen years. Tim was serially unfaithful. He contracted HIV/AIDS and infected monogamous John. John died first. Playwright Nick Enright, who had been Conigrave’s teacher at NIDA, and Penguin editor Sophie Cunningham, worked on the rough text with him and they helped smooth the words into their final shape—which resembles a formula piece of Penguin young adult fiction, plus obscenity and tears. It is a story from the dark side of Never Never Land: the prince marries his prince, and both die.

Conigrave wanted to be liked by his two editors and loved by his readers, and the text has been crafted to seduce. His revelations of sexual activities were meant to shock and titillate the two helpful gatekeepers but not to irrevocably offend their feminist and inner-city sensibilities. Conigrave flirts with his readers. When he confesses to hurting John, his lover, he does so with seemingly innocent charm which camouflages his cruelty and sexual boasting. Some who have written of the play, like David Marr, Benjamin Law and playwright Tommy Murphy, have fallen in love with him: as have, probably, many of Penguin’s female book buyers. Behaviour that would be castigated in heterosexuals is excused or ignored because Tim was gay, and like a fabulous movie star, died young. The love affair is not only between Tim and John, it’s between its readers and Tim.

This gay memoir has been viewed with little real criticism. But Holding the Man is no memoir, it’s a novel told through a series of remembered, invented or improved scenes with crude sexual language—the masculine-belittling obscenity pleases gay activists and feminists. To criticise real people one never knew would be cruel, but treating fictional Tim and fictional John as characters in a novel results in a less starry-eyed analysis.

When fictional Tim begins writing, his lover John has been dead several years. The characters have been described as Australia’s Romeo and Juliet who lived out a great gay love story until killed by AIDS. Their story has also been seen as an argument for gay marriage.

Some enthusiastic readers should show more common sense. The stupidity is unending. Fictional Tim, charming and chatty and so frank about sex, was a louse, an irresponsible and selfish lover. The fifteen-year relationship described in the book was an on-and-off opportunistic linking. The character John is strangely passive and poorly described. He is being written about after his death with much romanticism and little reality. Conigrave the creator is not very good at entering into the mind of his creature, who is only used as a foil for Tim the narrator.

If this is truly the representation of gay marriage, which its readers suggest it is, then Yes voters in the same-sex-marriage postal vote would have an argument for asking for the return of their ballot papers. It is a history of sexual betrayals in a time of plague. Fictional Tim’s actions destroy the trusting basis of John’s life. Retold in conventional terms of legal marriage, this love story could be the prelude to a divorce story. A heterosexual version would never have been published by Penguin, and, obviously, never have been raved about by the sodomy snobs.

The play opens with two ten-year-old boys playing:

Kevin: Maybe we shouldn’t play poofters any more.

Tim: (aside) My god, I’m a poofter.

Consistent visual marketing for the book, play and film shows two good-looking and healthy young men. The plight of real people with HIV/AIDS is irrelevant to the marketers. In a few years we have travelled from the Grim Reaper to AIDS poster boys. The first edition had a cover quote by David Marr informing female Penguin book buyers that it was a “fine, tender, sexy book”.

Belvoir’s 2007 teaching notes do not mention the parents of the students who are being indoctrinated. It neither suggests why the play is suitable for school kids nor how and why teachers should prepare their charges for barbarism. The information in the teaching notes about HIV is scant and meaningless:

In the early 1980s HIV/AIDS surfaced in Australia for the first time. There was a great deal of fear, misinformation and misconceptions about this disease in the beginning. The perceptions and information you and your peers have today about HIV/AIDS are probably very different from those of high school students in the early 1980s. At the end of 2005, there were an estimated 15,310 people living with HIV in Australia.

Today the figure is in excess of 25,000.

The play’s director, who commissioned Murphy to write the play, contributed a text: “We knew we were embarking on a very special journey. We were about to step inside one of our greatest love stories.” He also said, “Tim hurt John many times during their 15 years together, and John absorbed the hurt. In story terms, AIDS might be seen as a metaphor.” Metaphors don’t kill: infidelity did. The theatre’s teaching notes offer a list of ideas in the play—HIV/AIDS doesn’t get a mention.

Murphy also offered an interpretation of Tim:

We have come to believe that Tim wrote the book partly to say sorry (for all the hurt) and thank you (for all the love). Maybe that’s why he wrote John so idealistically, and himself so judgmentally. The book is a kind of gift to John.

He wasn’t being judgmental about himself, he was boasting. Fictional Tim is one of those boring men who cannot stop talking about sex. One of the characters in the play says to him: “Oh, look, I’m sick of this. Why do you have to make such an issue of it? There’s more to you than being gay, but it’s all you ever talk about.” Fictional Tim has been praised for being candid about his sex life. He simply can’t shut up. Had he lived and the story continued he would have been one those terrible bores—both homo and hetero varieties exist—who cannot stop talking about sex.

While not providing a discussion of HIV/AIDS for modern students, two pointless pages are devoted to reproducing and discussing a publicity postcard for the production. After examining it, students have to answer dumb questions such as, “I am 62 years old and want to be [sic] the cheapest ticket I can to a performance of Holding the Man? [sic] What is the cheapest ticket I can purchase? Are there any conditions attached?” and also, “What time is the performance of Holding the Man on Tuesday 30th October?”

At the end, we finally get to “Thinking About the Ideas of the Play” and a helpful list is provided: Growing Up, Identity, Love, Faithfulness, Trust, Ambition, Prejudice, Fear, Guilt, Loss, Death and Grief. The childish activities suggested include, “Collect images and media which represent or deal with one or more of these ideas”; “Make a list of books, films or plays you have studied that explore one or more of these ideas”; “Can you think of a concrete stage prop could represents [sic] each of the ‘intangible’ ideas or ‘themes’ listed above? E.g. BETRAYAL—a broken gift.” Nothing deals with the sexual matters displayed in the play or the language used.

Though no suggestion is given to teachers for introducing the play’s obscene language and crude sexuality to the students in their care, there might be a vague allusion in questions the students are asked to answer, “What does the word ‘unflinching’ mean? Would you describe Tommy Murphy’s adaptation as ‘unflinching’?”

Control freaks have charge of the children. At the very least, play analysis should discuss the characters and their motivations, and responses should be rightly critical of their behaviour. Pity the kid who points out the play was crap and the sexuality was politics.

In Brisbane, La Boite’s teaching notes suggested that students talk to their parents (note plural) before seeing the play. And talk about homosexuality, sodomy, monogamy? No, it was suggested the parents should be interviewed and asked about life in the 1980s—what schools they attended, what music they liked, their favourite films and sitcoms. After which students would “Present the results of your interview in the style of This is Your Life with classmates in role as parents.” You could imagine the parents were deliberately not being told anything meaningful about the play they were paying for their children to see. From the name of the play, Holding the Man, some innocents may have imagined the kids were being taken to see a play about football.

The Brisbane actors were interviewed for the teaching notes and one was asked, “What do you hope will be embraced by the new generation who see Holding the Man?” He replies:

It’s about time people realise that sexuality is no longer even a thing. Love is love, life is life. We should be able to love who we want. Even the word “tolerance” angers me. I think because the book and in turn the play are so human it will make people see a story of love and tragedy between two people who both happen to be men. I want as many school audiences as possible. If we make them feel for Tim and John as they would for their loves and losses, maybe we can open their eyes and see we are all just people, before negative, misguided opinions of past generations can get in their heads. That, and witnessing a modern tragic love story. Simple as that.

It’s not so simple, or as irresponsible. His comments were published, surely approvingly, without any further comment.

One of the insightful remarks in the play deserved mature, not secondary student, consideration. After Tim and John are told they are HIV-positive, Tim wants to have sex and John replies, “I don’t want to have anal sex, Tim. That’s how we got into this mess.” The discussion might also consider Tim’s continued promiscuity after his diagnosis, and the further betrayals of his partner.

At the end of the play, some years after the death of John, Tim is in Italy. A beautiful boy who works in a local bar reminds him of John: “He occupies my dreams: I fall in love so easily these days.” Nothing has changed. He is still what he was and, as fictional John might have said: “Tim, that’s how we got into this mess.”

Meanwhile, in our schools, barbarism is the curriculum.