homosexual

Mike Mullins

I don’t relate to the word ‘queer’. ‘Gay’ has never sat comfortably with me either. Perhaps I’m just old-fashioned, but I’ve always been most relaxed with the word ‘homosexual’.

Growing up in a small town in Australia is challenging for anyone who is different. Especially when you are born in 1951 and your world is the monoculture that was Australia in the post-war years. It is doubly challenging when you are a male child who hates playing sport and displays a creative flair for doing things in his own unique way.

The Rock in New South Wales was established as a railway town in the later part of the nineteenth century, when the first steps were being taken to bring together the separate colonies into one nation. Down the road in the Victorian town of Glenrowan, the Kelly gang was blazing a trail of mythological proportions, the iconic Bulletin magazine was in its embryonic years, and many of the artists and writers and performers who thrived at the time – Mary Gilmore, Henry Lawson, Nellie Melba, and the painters Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Fred McCubbin – captured a very romantic view of Australia. In 1883, the Sydney-to-Melbourne railway line officially opened – for the first time you could travel between the two cities by train. A railway engineer who took the route observed, ‘There were no townships touched between Wagga and Albury, and the country is but thinly populated.’ It wasn’t until March 1885 that The Rock was proclaimed. The name was controversial as the township’s station was originally called ‘Hanging Rock’, but the rock in question had actually fallen ten years earlier. So it became, simply, ‘The Rock’. I was staggered to discover that the town had only been established sixty-six years before I was born.

My school years at The Rock were challenging, and few memories from that time can be recalled with fondness or nostalgia. According to a former teacher I was an effeminate child, which made me an easy target for bullying.

The playground was a place of torture. I dreaded recess and the seemingly endless lunch period in particular. The negative attention from the boys was relentless: regular rituals of ganging up on me, calling me nasty names and much worse. I have no idea whether my teachers were aware of this or felt any responsibility to deal with it. This was the 1950s, when a man had to be a man and if things were tough, you had to learn to toughen up.

These attacks also went beyond the boundaries of the school. On the way home, I was often stoned and bashed and my bike was frequently thrown into the creek. I remember on one occasion being held down by one of the boys while the others pissed on me. The culture that many now call ‘toxic masculinity’ reigned supreme at The Rock during my childhood.

One day the headmaster caught me walking hand in hand with a fellow student who I’ll call Johnny. It was not sexual. Johnny was the only male student who I became friends with during the late primary-school years. He was the son of a farmer, but I don’t remember why we connected. The next day, at the school assembly, the headmaster called us both up in front of the entire school and forced us to walk hand in hand. The kids screamed with laughter and the humiliation was intense. Johnny never associated with me again and I think that this was the day we both lost our innocence. Our childhood concluded. The message was clear: men don’t touch each other except in formal handshakes and in contact sports.

More and more, I retreated to the company of girls. I felt safe in their presence – a refuge from the toxicity of the schoolyard. All of this changed, of course, when puberty arrived and the boys started sniffing around the girls. My presence was suddenly unwelcome to both genders.

Away from school, in the safety of our backyard and in the company of the neighbourhood kids, were more positive experiences. The creek that runs through the town was frequently dry and an exotic place to play: curved sheets of tin became slides down the grassy slopes; curves in the dry creek bed became battlegrounds for games of Cowboys and Indians; scaling fallen trees made for epic adventures; and the native birds provided a rich soundtrack to it all. Life at The Rock was not all negative.

My first sexual experience arrived with an unexpected visit from an older boy in the neighbourhood. He wanted to know if I had done ‘it’. The enquiry was about masturbation (commonly referred to as ‘wanking’ or ‘jerking’), and he was eager to show me the way when my answer was ‘No, what is it?’ This was not a homosexual act; there is no doubt in my mind that all he was doing was exploring and sharing the newly discovered capacities of his cock.

The games at the creek changed when testosterone became the driver. A couple of generous girls were happy to share their bodies with a group of us fellas on the banks of the creek, but it soon became apparent to me that I was more interested in watching the blokes in action.

My sexual life became very secretive. Suddenly, there was a compelling reason to be among the boys and some, who had so ruthlessly harassed me when I was younger, now found my company convenient. That convenience had its rules and restrictions and under no circumstances could it be discussed with anyone – including the boys themselves, until there was a need to catch up again. I enjoyed these clumsy sexual encounters and, in some ways, I think now I yearn a little for the purity of those first experiences. These days, sex has long lost its innocence.

Beyond the physical pleasures of these encounters was another, more complex dimension, which was a desire to be accepted. It would take a further five decades to fully understand the intricacies of that particular ache, its connection to my deeply entrenched anxiety and its associated fear of rejection. But in some small way in those early encounters, my tormentors accepted me and with that came a hint of empowerment and the beginnings of my life as a homosexual man.

In late 2014, I suffered a nervous breakdown. Triggered by a series of workplace bullying incidents, which had nothing to do with my sexuality, one day I started to shake uncontrollably. It wouldn’t stop. These circumstances led to my resignation from the job and a period of intense therapy. It turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me. I had long avoided dealing with the many issues that had influenced and informed who I was. In the therapeutic process I discovered that I was born an anxious person, due to the circumstances of my birth-mother. It’s now been clinically proven that if a woman is stressed and anxious during pregnancy, it has an effect on the unborn child, predisposing them to anxiety. Being a young Catholic girl in 1951, pregnant out of wedlock, must have been extremely stressful. The stigma of unwanted pregnancies in those days was brutal, so she had no option but to give her child up for adoption.

I spent eighteen months with my psychiatrist, deconstructing my life. The circumstances of my birth, a childhood with a violent, alcoholic father and the toxicity of my school years were just the beginning. Having been a homosexual in Australia during the ’60s and ’70s brought a whole set of issues as well. Homosexuality was not only illegal in those days, but also seen as a human deficiency, in terms of both masculinity and mental health. I confronted all of this (and more) as we unpacked the jigsaw of my life, piece by piece.

When the therapy was finished, I was a new person. For the first time in my life I became very confident about my sexuality. At sixty-five years of age I suddenly became a highly active sexual being. I acquired a contemporary haircut, started to go to the gym six days a week, lost 20 kilograms, pierced my ears and had a tattoo inked on my left arm. My friends would ask, ‘Is this the new Mike?’ My answer was succinct: ‘No, this is the Mike that always was but until now has never been allowed to be.’

In 2018, I watched the live broadcast of the Australian parliament passing the same-sex marriage legislation. When the strong contingent of advocates in the visitors’ gallery broke into song with a rendition of ‘I Am Australian’, I started to cry.

I sobbed uncontrollably for forty minutes. I couldn’t stop. The tears came from deep inside and they were cathartic.

Afterwards, I wondered: why did I cry like that? The answer was simple: as an adult, for nearly fifty years, I had felt a lesser person, a sub-citizen, an inferior man.

Suddenly – finally – that was all gone.