It may seem a strange thing to say, but at the age of nine or ten I had no idea what ‘sex’ meant, and indeed may not by then have even heard the term. ‘Gender’ I did meet: it was a term used in one of our English Grammar textbooks in Grades Five or Six. I learned that there were two genders, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ and I delighted in learning off by heart lists of matching terms set out in the book: king and queen, duke and duchess, earl and countess, marquis and marchioness, abbot and abbess, prior and prioress and so on. These were, however, just words to me, tricky terminology which I enjoyed grasping quickly so that I could score top marks in English tests.
I saw and read about and heard of people performing various roles (priest, bishop, nun, angel, father, mother, train driver, soldier, sailor, airman, etc.) dressed in various ways (trousers, skirts, uniform, priestly vestments, the angel’s toga etc.) but was never told that I might aspire to some lifestyles and some forms of dress, though not others. I was constantly being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, yet did not know that boys were supposed to do some things, and girls other things. Although the first three years of my schooling were co-educational, Kilbreda was essentially a convent and girls’ school, where boys were accepted only up to Grade Two, and where both in the classroom and in the playground boys and girls were in fact kept apart. I never wondered why and accepted it as simply one of the many incomprehensible rules imposed by adults. So the children I played with were always boys, and none of them ever, at least in the primary grades, raised the subject of sex or told jokes about sex or proposed any sort of remotely sexual game or experimentation.
From as early an age as I can remember I was attracted by beauty … a beautiful countryside, picture, house, cake, piece of material, item of clothing, book, jewel, person. On the other hand, I certainly learned to value a person for the beauty of character before I became interested in the person’s physical beauty. I loved my family and aunt and maternal grandmother and our maid Vera for themselves, without any consideration of their appearance. In retrospect, however, I can see that this love of beauty was unusual in a boy. It seems to have replaced any interest in things mechanical or sporting or practical. I was given an Indian tent and a cowboy’s hat and pistol one Christmas but quickly found them boring. A cricket set of bat, ball and three stumps fared no better, even with my father making the effort to find time to play cricket with me in the backyard. I never had, or wanted, a pair of football boots or running spikes and really had no interest at all in which team beat which at school or on Saturday afternoon in the big league.
The year before my father died, when I was about fifteen, I began to go to an occasional football match on a Saturday afternoon with my father. He more often spent Saturday afternoon at the races with my mother and I now suspect that these trips to the football with me may have been linked to my parents’ perception that I was entering puberty and needed some male bonding and male role models. Vera knitted me a scarf in the purple and gold colours of the local team and Dad and I would walk to the football ground and sit or stand with the crowd of local supporters. The visiting team was often jeered and the umpire was not infrequently booed. Dad of course never took part in that sort of behaviour, so neither did I. He had played football for St Pat’s in Ballarat and I think he actually enjoyed watching these games. Having never really played and knowing virtually nothing about the game, I was bored stiff although I did like being there with my Dad and tried to appear interested. I did, however, discover an emerging interest in the individual players, in their physical prowess and especially in their physical appearance, their trim bodies and muscular thighs and in some cases their good looks. I think that my idea of the perfect male body grew out of these afternoons at the ‘footy’.
When I was twelve or so years old our Form Master at St Kevin’s had puzzled me (and perhaps others) by one day devoting the entire Christian Doctrine lesson to a talk about what he called ‘wet dreams’ and ‘nocturnal emissions’. As I had not by then experienced the phenomenon I literally did not know what he was talking about. I think he summed up by saying that it was a natural bodily function, that it usually started to occur in boys at around age twelve or thirteen, that we should not be worried by it, that it could be quite pleasurable, that we should never seek to bring it on (that would be a sin of ‘self-abuse’) … and that we should not discuss the subject with our classmates in the playground after the lesson. None of my schoolmates did raise the subject afterwards and I continued in my state of ignorance until one day some months later.
And so it was that my very first experience of sex involved sex with animals … not that I really began my sex life with a burst of bestiality, sometimes joked about as a novelty for the more depraved urban dwellers or as a desperate substitute for lonely shepherds … but simply that it involved the family cat. A well fed and not very athletic ‘tom’ known as His Highness, he was, however, neither the victim of, nor even knowing participant in, the scene (he had, after all, been ‘cut’ at a tender age).
I had just returned from a family outing to the beach and was still in my damp swimming trunks. My father had parked the car safely in the garage and I was following the others across the garden to the house for a shower and change when I espied His Highness curled up on the garden seat. Already last in the queue for the bathroom, I decided to wait in the garden for a while and to play with him. I sat down beside him, picked him up, put him on my lap, and started to pat him. His Highness began to purr happily and soon started, as cats do, to knead the lap it was sitting on. Some cat psychologists say that this harks back to kittenhood when the contented kitten kneaded its mother’s belly to extract more milk from her nipples. In this case, however, what His Highness was kneading was not his mother’s tummy, not Great-Aunt Maud’s lap, but my penis and testicles, thinly covered by a wisp of damp swimsuit … and what he extracted was not his mother’s milk. To my surprise, my penis started to stiffen and extend, pushing against the fabric of my togs and even risking an encounter with His Highness’ claws. The sensation was strange but pleasurable … and grew more pleasurable until my penis was bigger than I had ever seen it and so stiff and so swollen that it seemed to actually burst, spraying sticky whitish goo over me. What on earth was going on? … and then my Form Master at school and his little talk on nocturnal emissions and self-abuse came to mind. Is that what had just happened? Could you have a nocturnal emission in the afternoon? The time of day involved seemed unlikely to be critical to the description of the act, and indeed it was already evening, almost nocte, and this certainly was an ‘emission’ and certainly a good deal of pleasure had been experienced by both me and the cat. In the cat’s case His Highness’ involvement in the crime had really been unwitting if not involuntary, and the burden of guilt, if there was any, undoubtedly fell on my shoulders. What should I do? Whom should I ask? Whom should I tell? I began to wonder if perhaps it was after all just some sort of freak accident and had nothing to do with nocturnal emissions, self-abuse and sin. If it never happened again then it probably was just an accident. If I could repeat the experience, with or without the help of His Highness, then perhaps there was a connection with the Forbidden Pleasures and I would have to discuss it with somebody.
Pushing His Highness aside I stood up, swinging my beach towel over my shoulder and letting one end fall loosely in front to cover, as best I could, the telltale wet patch on my bathers, and went inside for my turn at the shower. With calls from the kitchen to ‘hurry up in there, tea’s ready’, I had no time to try to repeat the experience but I did notice that as long as I thought about doing so my penis persisted in swelling slightly and looking reddish and thickish in a way I had never previously known. And it seemed a bit longer. And it sort of felt good …
That night, after kissing my parents goodnight, saying my prayers by the bedside and climbing into bed, I turned out the light and settled down to a bit of experimenting under the bedclothes. In no time at all, just thinking about the idea and merely touching my penis produced the swelling and stiffening so pleasurable in the afternoon, and then I found that a couple of rubs with my fingers brought on the emission of the whitish goo, accompanied by an indescribably intense and good feeling of pleasure and release and relief. This was then followed, alas, by what the novelist François Mauriac called l’antique tristesse34 which almost inevitably quickly follows orgasm, the sense of knowing that something wonderful had just ceased to be. As the song so rightly says:
Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment,
Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie!35
I got my handkerchief from under my pillow and cleaned up the sticky mess on the bedclothes and on my pyjamas, threw the handkerchief under the bed to be collected in the morning and taken to the laundry basket when an opportunity to do so unobserved arose … and quickly fell asleep.
So that is when I became a great sinner, enjoying the pleasures of masturbation almost every day, often several times a day, and then heading off to Confession every Saturday so that I would be able to go to Mass and Communion with a clean slate and pure soul on Sunday morning. Each week I would make a great effort not to start again but rarely held my resolve beyond Monday night. It now seems surprising to me that my parents never said anything about sex education to me, and I can only suppose that they had ‘passed the buck’ to the school or else that they regarded puberty as a natural phenomenon that I should be left to discover for myself. Given my father’s reasonably firm religious convictions, I suspect that the former was his view and that he endorsed the school’s advice that masturbation was a sin … though perhaps, given his medical training, not a very serious one and more of a bad habit (like biting one’s finger nails)! My mother, on the other hand, may well have taken the latter view and I greatly doubt that she saw masturbation as sinful or as a serious problem. One day she surprised me in the very act, down in the privacy of the woodshed, and she retreated with an ‘Oh, you’re in here!’ faster than I could stuff my cock and clothes back into my trousers. Whether she told my father about the incident I don’t know … it was never mentioned by anyone, and after the initial shock of being discovered, I continued with my pleasureseeking, though probably a little more carefully and discreetly.
The strange thing is that by the end of secondary school, all I knew about sex was that masturbation was of course free and was fun but was, alas, the sin of self-abuse. I never wondered whether girls also could masturbate, had no idea as to how the female genitalia differed from that of males, had never been told about procreation and the ‘birds and the bees’ and, having grown up in the city away from the enlightening behaviour of farm animals, I knew nothing about intercourse between male and female. I had never wondered why my parents slept in the same bed and had never wondered or asked where we children had come from. In my all-boys secondary school, none of my schoolmates ever discussed sex in my hearing, and never told jokes about sex. While I kissed both of my parents goodnight every evening and my female relatives on meeting them, these were chaste little kisses on the cheek or forehead, and I knew nothing about the thrills of kissing on the mouth … playing around with girls was never discussed in my gang of school friends. I can remember being rather bored at the cinema when romantic interludes appeared in films, and when Cary Grant worked his way up to kissing his leading lady on the lips, I used to wish they’d hurry up and get back to the main story of the film. At that time, Hollywood adhered to a fairly strict code of censorship as far as sex was concerned and there was never anything to indicate that passionate kissing was a prelude to even more pleasurable activity. It was, I think, referred to as the ‘one foot on the floor policy’: petting and pashing were permitted between the stars of the film (heterosexual stars, of course: pace Cary Grant and Rock Hudson et al.) provided they remained clad and, if reclining on couch or bed, kept one foot on the floor. Thus far and no further! And yet I sensed that there was some sort of sexual activity engaged in by men and perhaps by women (but not by my own parents, of course!) and that selfabuse was a sin and a bad habit because it in some way frustrated proper sexual function. But I had no idea of what ‘proper sexual function’ actually was. It now seems extraordinary to me that it was possible in an Australian city in the 1950s for a boy to reach his teens without any knowledge of sex and to then be taught just one thing about it … that it was pleasurable but sinful.
The year after my father died, when I turned seventeen and my brother thirteen, I asked one of the senior teachers whom I most respected to explain the ‘facts of life’ to my younger brother. ‘Killer’, Br Kilmartin, was I think a bit surprised and so I explained that as our father had died just before Peter presumably reached puberty, I thought someone should step in and explain things … and that I felt unable to. Killer rather reluctantly, I think, agreed to my request, although I never knew whether he actually did speak to Peter, and I never asked Peter or discussed sex with him. (I do feel, however, that Peter grew up with a much more sensible approach to sex than I. My initial reaction to later hearing that he, his wife and their young children swam naked together in their swimming pool was one of surprise and disapproval, while I now see such a relaxed attitude in the home to the human body as a very sensible way of gradually introducing children to the facts of life.) What was my motivation in asking Killer to explain things to my brother? I now think that I had two intentions: one was to try to spare him the guilt and confusion that I was experiencing; and the other was, I think, the faint hope that I might through some side effect learn the facts of life myself!
The facts of life were not, however, explained to me until I was part way through my second year at university, and then it was done by a friend only a year or so older. At last I learned that the man pushed his erect penis into the woman’s vagina (I suspect I nodded knowingly, although I was not at all sure what a vagina was or just why a man would want to do this), shooting his ejaculate up the passageway towards her womb, where it could fertilise the woman’s eggs and make a baby. It all sounded more like hard work than fun. So that was proper sexual function!
‘How does the baby get out of the womb after the nine months of growth?’ I remember asking … and there my informant was able only to speculate that ‘it was probably the same way as it got in’. This conversation took place before the days of television and the enlightenment generally available nowadays through that medium, and perhaps explains how I could grow to adulthood without ever really knowing the details of the processes of conception and birth.
Thirty or more years later I was talking with my Aunt Nell, then approaching 90, about her days as an art student in Melbourne. When she had first come to the city from her home in the country, at the tender age of twenty, she had stayed with a great-uncle and his wife, then living in an outer suburb. But after a few months of travelling by bus and train into and out from the city every day, she got her parents’ approval to find ‘digs’ closer to the city centre and the National Gallery School of Art in the CBD. She somehow or other was put in touch with a family living in a very posh part of South Yarra on the edge of Toorak, a family where the husband’s business interests had declined so far as to convince his wife that to save the day she should take in one or two very respectable ‘paying guests’. The family home was large and comfortable, Nell said, close to the Botanical Gardens and to the stop of the tram running directly to the Gallery School at the top of Swanston Street. The arrangement seemed to suit everybody and so Nell moved in. Nell added that in her second term at the Art School she had become quite keen on a young chap in her class and apparently got to the stage of talking about him with her landlady, who tended to ‘mother’ her. She then amazed me by saying that it was the landlady who had at that stage explained to her the facts of life, ‘how babies are made’, as Nell put it. ‘Wouldn’t you think that Mum would have explained all that to me before letting me come to live alone in the city?’ she added. I could only agree, not having realised until then that my grandmother might have had some shortcomings in her role as a mother and some serious inhibitions as regards sex. And what about grandma’s own mother, my valiant Great-Grandmother Fanny? Had she explained the facts of life to her daughters?
She had had eleven children, and my grandmother seven. What was it about British and Australian society that so inhibited parents in their dealings with their own children? Are those inhibitions now a thing of the past? Has the recent influx of migrants from the even more inhibited and socially quite feudal Middle Eastern Muslim world worsened the problem in this area of social behaviour? I found Nell’s little story quite sad; she had apparently fallen in love with her classmate and, thanks to the timely advice from her landlady, she had not let the relationship go too far too fast for, by the end of the third term, the classmate had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, from which he died within a few months. Nell contracted the disease from him (she smilingly explained that they used to suck on the same pencils and paintbrush handles in art classes). Her coughing and pallor were immediately noticed by my mother when Nell visited her at St Vincent’s Hospital and Nell was straightaway shipped back home to the country. Her parents were told that the only chance of recovery would be for Nell to keep to her bed for six months, the bed to be put out on the verandah in the fresh air, a special diet to be closely followed and a program of breathing and chest exercises to be strictly followed. To everyone’s amazement Nell did exactly as the doctors ordered (proof, according to my mother, of her incredible willpower), made a full recovery, outlived all her siblings and died, ever celibate, on her 92nd birthday.
In the middle of my final year at school I had been asked to partner a lovely girl called Helen, the daughter of family friends, who was to attend the Loreto Ball and there to ‘make her debut’. Helen was beautiful and intelligent, with bright brown eyes and a dazzling smile, and I of course agreed. In this way I became caught up in a rather strange society ritual which was to play a significant part in my social and sexual education. The Ball was a quite grand affair, scheduled to be held in the St Kilda Town Hall, where guests could waltz and whirl around the dance floor to the strains of a large band installed on stage in the midst of a floral display, and where a splendid supper would be served when the dancers’ energies flagged. In addition to the 20 or 30 debutantes and their partners who would be presented to the Lord Mayor or Archbishop or some other dignitary, there would be up to a thousand paying guests drawn from the best Catholic social circles of Melbourne, the proceeds of the night going to support a childcare centre in a disadvantaged part of the city. To play my part in this glittering occasion, I had first of all to buy a dinner suit, black bow tie and pair of white gloves and, most importantly, to learn to dance. I was therefore enrolled in and attended for six or eight weeks the dancing classes given by a certain Miss Lascelles of Toorak. Miss Lascelles, a tall, slim, trim and somewhat grim lady of reportedly very genteel English origins, had trained generations of the offspring of upper middle-class Melbourne, often in preparation for formal balls of the type I was to attend, and I was quickly and skilfully introduced to the waltz, the rhumba, the fox trot, the quickstep, the samba, the tango, the Charmaine, the Pride of Erin, the Valetta and even the slightly less decorous progressive barn dance. Once these basics had been mastered, I was able to join the special class arranged to train that year’s debutante set which would be required to perform a show waltz as part of the presentation ceremony at the Loreto Ball.
These dancing classes were a bit of a challenge for me as I had not been in a co-ed situation since completing Grade Two at the convent school as an eight-year-old. At sixteen I needed lessons in social interaction as well as in dancing, but they were not included in the course. The hardest part of the classes for me was therefore not the dance instruction but having to mix with girls and trying to appear as if I were happy and relaxed and having fun like everybody else. Most if not all of the other teenagers in Miss Lascelles’ classes would have been from the feepaying, private, single-sex colleges in the Toorak/Malvern/Kew/ Hawthorn area, but none seemed as socially inept as me. I was pleased to be learning how to dance but was really not interested in dancing partners. I preferred the company of Beau Geste, King Arthur, Francis of Assisi and the myriad of other fictional and historical characters familiar to me from my reading. Looking back now, I see that I was not physically attracted to the girls as the other boys seemed to have been and I found it virtually impossible to socialise with the rather single-minded boys either. As a result, the actual dancing instruction appealed to me, but the socialising before and after, and in the interludes between instruction sessions, bored, pained and terrified me.
As part of the preparations for the night of the Ball, several of the debutantes’ families organised parties for the debutante set. Fortunately Helen, my partner, lived in the country, some 50 kilometres out of the city, and it was not practicable for her (and therefore for me) to attend every party so I was spared much enforced socialising. We did, however, attend one party, held in one of the mansion homes in Kew, and this was my first experience of an evening party for sixteen-, seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys and girls. I must have been a terrible embarrassment and disappointment to my poor partner, as I was probably the only male there not interested in the flirting and covert sexual games the others all seemed to enjoy. I did not feel the slightest desire to cuddle, grope or kiss any of the girls and was irritated by the way the other boys persistently sought to do so. There was certainly no alcohol but there was music and dancing, all seemingly designed to encourage smooching, and I was bored, bored, bored.
I was more interested in the beautiful house and furnishings, and in the elaborate supper … and, alas, I had exactly the same reaction on the night of the Ball itself. The setting in the Town Hall, the flowers, the women’s dresses, the orchestra, the supper, were all wonderful; the dancing was both a challenge and fun; and the enforced socialising was torture. I was probably the only partner who did not try to steal a kiss (or more), and I can still recall the sense of mild expectation, disappointment and even understanding on Helen’s part that I felt as I finally said goodnight to her.
I suspect that she had begun to understand me before I had myself. What might have seemed to other observers to be mere shyness and inexperience on my part was, I now think, simply the normal reaction of a homosexual male to a heterosexual situation … lack of interest. But I was far from realising that and, indeed, at that stage had no familiarity with the terms or their connotations.
At the end of the year I completed Matriculation and was ready to leave St Kevin’s. My mother agreed that I could have an end-of-school and Christmas party and invite all my school friends. So that we could include dancing on the program of events, I had to think of an equal number of girls to invite … and that was difficult, as I had not sought to keep contact with any of the girls at Miss Lascelles’ classes or in the Loreto debutante set, other than my partner Helen. So Helen obligingly headed the list, and was joined by my sister (already at university but kindly agreeing to dance with my schoolmates eighteen months her junior), by a cousin, by the sister of my best friend at school, and by the daughters of several of my mother’s friends. In other words, the only girls I knew were either relatives or family friends. We all had a good time, I think, one of my school friends declaring himself bowled over by the beauty of my cousin (who subsequently entered the convent and spent her life teaching music). But again, I think, I was probably the only one there not really interested in socialising with the opposite sex; it was a party I had organised to please my friends, and my friends were all boys. I was trying to be like them, to share their interests and tastes, but was finding out that when it came to socialising, I really shared little with them.
When I finished secondary school, with a Commonwealth Scholarship that made university study possible without being a total burden on my widowed mother, I still had no real plan as to what to do or how to earn the money needed to replace my father financially and to support my mother and the family. I had no strong attraction to any particular occupation. Medicine, to follow my father’s and my sister’s footsteps, was out of the question as I was of a squeamish nature and inclined to faint at the sight of blood. Aware of this, I had opted not to do the Physics and Chemistry at Matriculation level necessary for entry to the Faculty of Medicine. I was very interested in French and History, so a career in teaching seemed a possibility. I was mildly interested in Law, although I now suspect that it was the trappings, the robes and wigs of the barristers, the purple and ermine magnificence of the judges (copied from that of bishops), the theatre-like courtrooms, the monumental court houses … and the opportunity to lord it over laymen and law-breakers that had really appealed to me. I was interested in Geography, and in travel, and in passenger ships … but, lacking the initiative of a Thomas Cook, I did not see a way to make a living from those interests. I was also rather interested in the life of a priest or brother or monk, especially those living in great Gothic abbeys, but saw them all as closed to someone with my continuing indulgence in the pleasures of masturbation and with the financial responsibilities of a head of family! My Aunt Nell thought I had potential as an actor and, perhaps thinking of her Uncle Joe’s career in the theatre in England36 as some sort of precedent, suggested I consider an acting career. Everyone else, however, myself included, thought that too financially risky a life given our family circumstances. After an interview with a guidance officer at the university I finally opted to tackle the combined course for degrees in Arts and Law. It gave me one of the widest ranges of career choices available at the university.
My mother was anxious that I follow my father’s example and live in Newman College at the university, so I had an interview there with the Rector. He quickly saw my indecision about what I wanted to do and advised me to take a year off study, to go and get a job somewhere and to think things through. I don’t know why I did not follow this sensible advice – probably because of the selfish wish to keep up with my classmates going on to university – and was soon enjoying university life myself.
By living in Newman College, I had unwittingly isolated myself from my school friends attending university, all of whom continued to live with their families in the suburbs and to commute to the campus each day. Moreover, I had, without realising it, continued the isolation of my single-sex schooling, as Newman was run by the (all male) Jesuit37 order and accepted only male students as residents. While the university itself was of course completely co-educational I found that Newman students tended to walk across to the faculties to attend lectures and tutorials, or to borrow books from the library, and then returned almost immediately to the college to study, and for all meals and even coffee breaks. I followed suit and soon found that I was quite isolated from the vast majority of university students who studied in the university library and who socialised in the students’ Union Building and its cafes, lounges, shops and locker rooms. So my life continued to be almost exclusively with males. At weekends I would return home for some family life (with my mother, sister and brother and my five uncles). From time to time my sister would invite both male and female medical students to the house for Sunday dinner, while I never managed to invite anyone other than students from Newman … all male, of course. It may well have been apparent to everyone else that I was not seeking female company. No explanation was ever sought, and I doubt that I could have articulated the explanation myself, but during my university years I had several experiences that did begin to make the explanation clearer to me.
I did, during first year at university, show some interest in amateur theatricals and was, to my surprise, cast to play the romantic leading man in a Newman production of the Russell Oakes play Enduring as the Camphor Tree in the Union Theatre. At one stage I was required to kiss the leading lady. Fortunately, we were all dressed up as and pretending to be well-mannered inhabitants of the court of the Japanese Emperor. As a result, the kiss took place with great decorum behind the fluttering fan of the young lady … and so did not have to be a real kiss at all, just a pause of plausible duration. Fortunately for me, the leading lady was at the time keen on the actor playing the villain of the show and did not seem put off by my lack of interest in a spot of passion. I doubt that she or any of the cast guessed just how disinclined I was to kiss her and am confident that nobody guessed that I too might have been more interested in the handsome chap playing the role of the villain.
At the end of my first year at university I was called up to do the first stage of my National Service obligation. I found this a rather daunting requirement and was glad that my Uncle Bert, a returned serviceman himself, took me aside one day and said not to worry about it all: ‘Everyone else will be in the same boat,’ he said, ‘and underneath they will all be a bit scared and lost and lonely, and you’ll probably make some good friends there.’ So along with a few thousand other eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, I set off on a steam-hauled troop train for the army camp at Puckapunyal, 60 or so kilometres north of Melbourne. Half of the three thousand draftees in that particular intake were university students and I found myself ‘living under canvas’, i.e. sleeping in a very large army tent, one of twenty students similarly assigned to a platoon of D Company. I had dreaded this enforced experience of army life but, as Bert had foretold, found living with my companions in misfortune surprisingly agreeable. Certainly I regarded the military training itself as a waste of time, the endless parade-ground drilling and marching always seemed ridiculous, the rifle practice and particularly the bayonet practice (where we had to strip to the waist and were actually ordered to let out blood-curdling yells such as ‘Fuck you, you German bastard!’ or ‘Fuck you, you Jap cunt!’ as we charged up to and bayoneted man-size straw dummies) were philosophically repugnant: I did not want to be taught how to kill people or how to use such vulgar language and regarded such instruction as a wicked waste of taxpayers’ money.
The largely outdoor life, the good and plentiful food, the physical exercise and above all the camaraderie were, however, unexpectedly pleasant and, although like most of the other students I continually grumbled about it all, I took away many happy memories of those first 98 days as a ‘Nasho’. I was, after all, back in my all-male environment! Showering every day in the huge open-sided shower blocks and swimming naked in a nearby creek with 30 or 40 other fit young men offered me unexpected pleasures, ones discreetly availed of and ones probably not intended by the army authorities. There were certainly no sexual adventures other than my daily enjoyment of the sight of my companions’ bodies. On some very hot Sundays I joined a group of fifteen to twenty Nashos who were given permission to march away from the main camp and to spend the afternoon at a swimming-hole on a creek in the bush. To my surprise, the Nasho lance-corporal nominally in charge proposed, once we were a couple of kilometres into the bush and out of sight from the camp, that we ‘march easy’, i.e. not in step, and that we take off our singlets and shorts to keep cool. Everybody agreed and so we spent the three or four hours by the creek stark naked, swimming and lounging about. I think I hoped for further pleasant surprises, but there were none. It was for me a tantalising introduction to relaxing with a large group of naked males. I may have been the only one to be tantalised by the scene. I certainly took care not to allow any visible sign of sexual interest to raise its head … and saw none around me. I was in fact surprised to discover that I could get through the week, and indeed a whole month, without masturbating. This was fortunate, as there was absolutely no privacy for trainees in the camp, even the toilets being open and door-less. I presume that everyone else led a similarly celibate life, whether by choice or by force of circumstances, as I never saw or heard of any sort of sexual activity while at Puckapunyal. I made several friendships during National Service which endured through adult life … and again, they were of course all male.
Once back at university and at Newman after my National Service basic training, I resumed my former lifestyle, spending my weeks in Carlton and my weekends at home in Kew. By then I was sure that there must have been more to sex than masturbation in private, but I didn’t yet know what it was. I started buying Men’s Health and Naturist magazines and answering classified ads in them that seemed to promise meetings with men similarly interested in sex. There were ads offering meetings with women, but I was unsure as to what one would do in such situations and unsure as to whether women really were as keen on sex as men … so I confined my exploring to men. On only two or three occasions did anything eventuate, and the first time was in the following autumn when I made contact with a chap a few years older, but considerably more experienced, than me. He had a small car, and we went for a weekend camping trip to the mountains near Lake Eildon. That was where, and when, I had my first experience of homosexual sex. The weekend happened to be cold and wet and neither the camping nor the sex, which amounted to no more than mutual masturbation, was very satisfactory. My partner in crime was, ironically, a Scoutmaster who left soon thereafter as part of a group of Scoutmasters chosen to represent Australian Scouting at the coronation of Elizabeth II in London. I wished him well but never saw him again. I can’t remember what lies I told my family to explain my absence that weekend, and had a sufficiently guilty conscience to keep me away from any similar experimentation for many months. It was at about this time that American maths lecturer and musical satirist Tom Lehrer became internationally known for his amusing and provocative little songs and I have ever since associated his ‘Be Prepared’ with my weekend in the bush with the Scout Master.
It must have been in about September of that second year at university that I had been told how babies were made but it was not until the following summer that I had my next sex lesson/ experience. I had somehow learned that the bathing-pavilions/ dressing sheds on the beach at Middle Park were places where one could not only get changed and have a shower but also sunbake naked behind the high fence of the Men Only area. So one sunny afternoon I made my way there and with some trepidation spread my towel out on a bench and tried to act the nonchalant habitué. There would have been a couple of dozen fellows sunbaking there, half of them old timers/retirees often dozing in the sun and half of them young bucks like me, carefully applying sun tan oil and, from under dark glasses, looking and learning. I think some of these chaps were genuinely sun-worshipers while others, like me, had another mission. It was a mildly social sort of scene, and many obviously were regulars and knew one another. Conversations with new chums such as me were struck up with requests for the time or for a match and so on, and even by sharing little routines such as moving one’s towel as the sun/shade moved, stepping under the open cold shower from time to time … ‘to cool off, eh, mate?’ or pulling on one’s bathers and going for a quick swim in the sea. Some of these opening gambits were simply friendly remarks intended to put one at ease while some of them, I eventually realised, were exploratory, designed to test interest in closer contact.
On my second or third visit that summer I struck up a conversation with a chap, possibly a year or so older than me, by the name of Chris. He was good-looking, well spoken, also at university, and only a little less timid than me, and at the end of the afternoon we had agreed to meet again the following weekend, same time, same place, weather permitting. The next weekend was indeed sunbathing weather and we duly met, applied sun tan oil to one another’s back and shared a pleasant couple of hours in the sun. Chris had the use of a family car; after a while he offered to drive further along the beach to a quiet spot where we might have some privacy. I was keen, so we drove a few kilometres to an isolated bit of scrubland in what is now the Westgate Bridge park, folded down the backs of the front seats in the car, got our gear off again, and enjoyed some hot sex … hot in both senses of the word, as there was little shade and the car was so hot we were quickly dripping with perspiration. This time I learned what ‘69’ meant sexually, and that it worked for both homosexual and heterosexual couples. I couldn’t imagine doing such a thing with any of the women I knew … but it was great fun with Chris!
Although we agreed to meet again, and soon, we never did. I was wracked with guilt and think that he was too. I didn’t go back to the dressing sheds for weeks, and when I did, briefly, to look for him, he wasn’t there. I did raise the subject with one of the Jesuits at Newman, telling him that I seemed to be homosexual rather than heterosexual and asking for his advice as to what I should do. He seemed not at all concerned or surprised by my revelation and question, and quietly said that many young fellows went through similar experiences. He said that for most young chaps the sex drive was quite strong and the way in which they responded to it depended largely on the circumstances in which they found themselves. If sex with a female, i.e. sexual intercourse, was available, most fellows opted for that but if sex was only, or seemed only, available with other males, usually in the form of mutual masturbation, many fellows did use that outlet as an alternative to masturbation alone. He advised me not to regard either experience as a serious sin and indeed seemed uncomfortable at my association of the two words ‘sex’ and ‘sin’. This very sensible and timely advice, that sex should not be readily associated with sin, helped me to keep things in perspective both then and later in life. The wise priest who gave the advice never made it to the upper echelons of the church and I often wonder whether he was too much of a realist, too honest a counsellor, to be a successful company man.
A few months later, randy and reckless again, I answered a classified ad in the newspaper seeking a male model, suspecting from the wording that more than photography was envisaged. A meeting was arranged in a hotel suite in St Kilda and I duly presented myself. The advertisers turned out to be a middle-aged couple, Viennese I would say from their accents. She wore a fur coat and her fair hair was done rather attractively in a French roll; he had grey hair, glasses and a dark suit. They wanted photos of the woman having sex with a young man. I tried to hide my puzzlement and, keen for the experience and for the money offered, asked no questions and agreed. Before adjourning to the bedroom to get ready, the woman somewhat ostentatiously took a pill, ‘The pill, just in case,’ she said and then disappeared into the next room to undress. I was invited to undress too, down to my jocks, the photographer checking that I was ‘in working order’. To my surprise, given my nervousness about what I was letting myself in for, and to his satisfaction, I was, and so we both went through to the bedroom. By no means sure what to do, I acted the shy innocent and the woman, who was not unattractive as she lay on the bed in the pose of Manet’s ‘Olympe’, seemed happy enough to guide me home. They didn’t want preliminaries and a pretence of love, just straightforward fucking, so that is what I gave them … ‘doing what comes naturally’ as one of the songs in Annie Get Your Gun, then playing at Her Majesty’s Theatre, said. The old chap clicked away with his camera for fifteen minutes or so, and then I was finished, paid, and quite politely shown the door. So that was what sex was about! At last I knew the details, had compared the naked male and female bodies, and had been able to do what was expected of me. But was I normal?
I really had enjoyed the sex with Chris (which had gone no further than ‘69ing’) much more than the ‘all-the-way sex’ with the woman in St Kilda. Sex had been designed by God for the procreation of children, or so the church taught, and as that could only happen when the sex was between male and female then sex between two males must have been unnatural … pleasurable but wrong. Waves of guilt washed over me again, but the urge to enjoy sex with somebody, anybody, was strong and masturbation seemed increasingly pointless.
During the university vacation I found work as a labourer on a dairy farm 60 kilometres east of Melbourne and there, thanks to the herd of 50 or so Guernseys and the two bulls, I learned some more sexual basics. One morning I rather diffidently reported to the farmer that while waiting in the milking shed yard for her turn to be milked one of the cows had been attempting to mount another. ‘Oh, okay then,’ he replied. ‘Which one was doing the bulling?’ and when I pointed out the culprit he just said that when the milking was finished we would take the cow along to the bull yard, as her behaviour indicated that she was ‘in season’ (whatever that meant). So we walked the cow up the lane towards the bull yard, where the occupant apparently smelled the approaching good times and started bellowing and snorting. ‘We’ll leave them to it,’ said the boss to my disappointment, adding what I came to realise was a favourite dairying joke: ‘There’s only one good job on a dairy farm, and the bull has it.’ Precisely what that job was and how the bull actually did it was not revealed until a few days later when I was entrusted with the task of walking another cow up to the bull yard and managed to linger long enough to watch the proceedings. There was a separate, smaller yard for the other bull, a ‘teenager’ bought a few months earlier as a pedigree Guernsey calf and being groomed for great things in his adult life. He must have had an inkling of what lay before him and opted for a bit of practice because one day I saw him standing over a moss-covered tree-stump about three feet high – just the right height for him to rub his cock and balls gently across its silky surface – he was masturbating! And the thought did occur to me: here was an animal masturbating for pleasure, doing what comes naturally, without any instructions from outside, and without any appearance of guilt. If masturbating could be a natural action on the dairy farm, how could it be a sin in the city?
I was beginning to feel that sex should be social, a way of linking to others, so I continued looking out for new opportunities. Why on earth did I not, as most boys presumably did, look for a steady girlfriend and the prospect of marriage and the unlimited sex it would bring? I have long mulled over these questions and now realise that the answer is that I was following my basic instincts … and my basic instincts did not draw me to the opposite sex nor to seeking guidance as to why I was not so attracted. I was simply not part of the heterosexual majority whose basic instincts drew them towards coupling with the opposite sex by whatever means the social customs of the country and day prescribed: marriage through the mediation of parents or matchmakers in some countries, or by means of flirting, courting and wooing in others, such as Australia.