The Watering Hole

Samuel Leighton-Dore

Some of my earliest recollections of sexuality took place by a swimming pool, the air thick with the smell of chlorine as my peers and I undressed behind loosely held beach towels. Changing rooms, full of swinging willies and naked butts, provoked a fresh sense of anxiety and excitement – an indication of things to come as I edged cautiously towards puberty.

I experienced my first erection while lining up for a waterslide at the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre. With bare bodies pressed into a long, shivering procession, I reached the front of the queue only to have an instructor (well, the pimply seventeen-year-old who mumbled ‘go’) point at the misshapen lump growing in my speedos and laugh.

‘Holy shit, he’s got a stiffy!’ he shouted. ‘Gross!’

A wicked chorus of laughter followed me as I leapt feet-first down the winding blue tunnel, flipping and cracking my face against the hard plastic walls, before disappearing into the churning waters below. Mortified, I held my breath and swam as far from the waterslide’s gaping exit as possible, resurfacing several metres away – covered in blood, forever changed and, truth be told, still a little hard.

The young man’s laughter rang out in my head. The word ‘gross’ stung like salted hot chips on my split bottom lip. I hadn’t noticed any girls in line, only boys, standing shoulder to shoulder, teeth chattering as drops of water ran slowly down their backs. Boys, their nipples hard and shrunken, skin prickled with goosebumps.

Boys, I thought. Gross . . .

One of several psychological repercussions from that day was that I convinced myself erections were my body’s way of expressing disgust. Whenever I saw something ‘gross’, such as an older male student walking topless and sweaty across the school cricket pitch, my dick would awaken and gently nudge my inner thigh to warn me. This made sense, I reasoned. It was a survival mechanism, albeit a highly visible and inconvenient one.

The alternative – that I was attracted to boys and slowly developing into a gay adult man – was far more daunting.

Unfortunately, my theory was soon disproven. During a lunchtime discussion with classmates about seeing family members naked, I exclaimed that the sight of my mother in the shower ‘gave me a stiffy’. The group erupted into giggles, and it became sorely apparent that my use of the word ‘stiffy’ had, in fact, been incorrect – and that perhaps the pool instructor had been right all along.

Perhaps my body was trying to tell me something.

Despite the early warning signs, over the following years swimming pools remained the backdrop to my sexual development. Growing up in the inner western suburbs of Sydney, the local public pool was my first and only point of contact with semi-naked human bodies that were not my own. Long afternoons spent at the pool were filed away: sun-bleached, flesh-toned collages to be revisited late at night, shrouded in the secrecy of bedsheets, pillow pushed to my groin.

While these memories were undoubtedly tinted by my slow sexual awakening, they meant much more to me than that. Throughout summer, I always looked forward to Saturday morning trips to the pool: retrieving loose hairbands and twenty-cent coins from the tiled floor of the deep end, ducking between crowded lap lanes and spending my allocated two dollars at the canteen. Ears popping, bloated bellies, patterned towels and long stretches of hot concrete: these are only some of the visceral memories I look back on fondly.

Hitting puberty, the annual school swimming carnival came to resemble a low-rent, increasingly horny debutante ball. Category: swimwear. For me, the carnival was an opportunity for boys (and girls, I guess) from all year groups to gather, undress, slip into tight scraps of navy fabric and compete against one another (as well as gay, I’ve always been a little competitive). They were also an opportunity to manoeuvre a solid minute-long perv at Lucas Bobbin’s chest or accidentally brush up against Harry Shield’s bum on my way to the loo – where the full-length changing-room mirrors were angled just right to catch a glimpse of older guys spraying piss into the long, teal-tiled urinals.

Pubescent triumphs aside, swimming pools also set the stage for numerous very steep, very public learning curves. At my Year 6 swimming carnival, I delivered my first Valentine’s Day card. I gave it to a blonde girl named Kelly after watching her win the U13 medley in a black one-piece. It was all very Cameron Diaz in Charlie’s Angels, I thought. She was fabulous – and I was relieved. Was I actually attracted to a girl? Propelled by an unrelenting sense of denial, had I stumbled blind and desperate into the shallow waters of heterosexuality?

Spoiler alert: I had not.

Standing before what felt like a stadium of eagle-eyed spectators, Kelly chuckled, tilted her head to the side in a way that felt patronising, and informed me that she’d already agreed to be another boy’s valentine. I overheard a passer-by whisper my name and laugh as I walked, dejected, back to my seat. I was more into Drew Barrymore anyway, I reminded myself in quiet consolation. No, I thought somewhere deep down, I was more into Charlie.

Coming out of the closet at sixteen, I quickly discovered that inner-city pools were the ideal place to bask in my emerging sexuality and confidence. Spending the day at Prince Alfred Park Pool – camper than Christmas, with its staggered lawns and bright yellow umbrellas – felt like stepping into the glossy pages of DNA magazine. Everywhere you looked there were chiselled abs and gym-built bums you could imagine bouncing on like they were trampolines.

There were more pragmatic benefits to pools, too. In a pre-Grindr world, Victoria Park Pool was the perfect casual first-date location or meeting place, particularly because it attracted the elusive and highly sought-after first-year gays from Sydney University.

However, these days, for me, swimming pools have quite simply become the great Australian equaliser.

I now live in a slightly conservative part of the Gold Coast, with my partner of five years, and our building’s 25-metre pool refuses to discriminate. In the stick of summer it unites us with our neighbours: the middle-aged, crop top–wearing Russian woman with the ‘cops are tops’ bumper sticker; the openly homophobic 78-year-old with throat cancer; the redheaded hippy divorcee and her teenage daughter, Shania – named, of course, after the Twain. Regardless of age, sexuality or politics, we gather in the shared, inherently human discomfort of 35-degree days: air thick, as always, with the smell of chlorine.

And what could possibly be more Australian than that?