I seemed, to the casual observer if not to those close enough to me to know better, to be a well balanced young chap, well behaved, well spoken, on the way to acquiring a good education, of a somewhat serious disposition, quite uninterested in sport or in chasing girls to flirt with, inclined to be religious, and undecided as to what profession to take up. But that was not really the truth. I was as ‘mixed up’ as many other young people, but usually managed to mask my inner turmoil. I suppose now that the asthma attacks I continued to experience were often triggered by inner tension. I vividly remember two of my sister’s medical student friends, rather brilliant and eccentric twin boys who, at the age of twenty, both wore gold-rimmed spectacles (which I associated with grandparents, retirement and old age) visiting our house one day when I was wheezing badly. They came into my room in friendly fashion and one of them sat on the edge of the bed and advised me to stop worrying about my mother and her financial problems. How they knew that I constantly worried about my mother and all the work she did I do not know. I was surprised by the advice and was shocked and even angered by the followup comment from the other brother that ‘parents have done their life’s work when their children reach adulthood and it does not make sense to question, or not to accept, their continuous, selfless giving.’ The twins, who really knew me only slightly, had identified one of the big problems I was grappling with: was I, with my father’s death, ‘the man of the house’ and the person who should be supporting the family in his place? How could I earn the money needed to do that? How could I selfishly enjoy the life of the university student while my mother was toiling away in that office, lugging bags of shopping home on the bus and tram and keeping ‘open house’ for her children and their ever-hungry friends? What should I do with my life? A second big problem was the issue of sex. How could I get enough sex while still acting responsibly towards my family? Was religion the answer? Perhaps a more devout life would stifle the sex urge and enable me to join a religious order and cease being a burden on my family.
With my personal life in a mess, I stumbled along academically, doing well in the subjects which I enjoyed and failing the two I did not. I had been encouraged when at the end of the first year the Philosophy Department asked me if I would be interested in doing an Honours course with them. I should have agreed as, to my surprise, I was finding Philosophy to be the most interesting subject in my course. However, doubting that in Australia one could make much of a living as a philosopher, I did not accept the offer. On the other hand, I loathed the two Law subjects I took in the second year, and had been shocked to find that the Law seemed to be more about preserving the status quo in society, about protecting the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’, than about the pursuit of Justice as proposed by Plato and the philosophers. So at the end of the second year I gave up the Law side to concentrate on the Arts degree, with a major interest in French, which I was finding very enjoyable: I began to feel that life as a French teacher might turn out to be a good solution to my problems.
The Arts degree eventually completed, I still did not know what to do. My aunt the nun sent me a suggestion in the form of a beautifully printed copy of Francis Thompson’s poem ‘The Hound of Heaven’. I resisted that temptation, seductive as it was. Teacher training would not bring in any income until at least another year of study had been completed and as I felt I just had to start bringing in some sort of income, I opted to start work as a temporary untrained teacher in the State High School system, then desperately short of staff. After two terms, however, I obtained, with the help of the French Department at the university, a position as assistant d’anglais38 for a year at the Lycée Michel Montaigne in Bordeaux, and then at the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris for the following year. Convinced that a period spent living in France was necessary for me to become sufficiently proficient in the language to teach it well, I accepted the posting and sailed for Europe at the end of the term.
Until the introduction of jet aircraft, which traverse in one hour the distance that the average liner does in a day, only the very wealthy could afford to travel by air between Australia and Europe; and as the much cheaper trip by sea took the best part of a month in each direction, it was not really possible for ordinary people to go to Europe for their two or three weeks of annual holidays. Even teachers and academics with their long summer holidays could not make the return trip by sea without taking additional leave. Going to Europe by sea was, in other words, a major undertaking and as it involved so much travelling time, few people could envisage making the trip more than once in a working life. Fares were expensive (my cheapest possible berth cost me ten weeks’ wages) and because living expenses in Europe were higher than in Australia, many young Australians looked for paid employment while abroad to eke out their savings.
There were many shipping companies offering sailings via Suez and a few operating via Panama or around the Cape of Good Hope. As a teenager with a box camera, I had hung around the docks in Melbourne almost every weekend inspecting and photographing the many passenger liners calling in, so my decision to travel on the Lloyd Triestino liner Australia was based on fairly thorough research. Though not as big or as fast as the P&O or Orient Line ships, the Italian vessel was more modern, offered real cuisine as opposed to the ‘pub grub’ in tourist class on British ships and, with its much more cosmopolitan passenger list, seemed (and proved indeed) to offer an easy escape route from the monolingual confines of the Anglo-Saxon world. I was of course thrilled at the prospect of the long sea voyage with calls in Fremantle, Djakarta, Colombo, Aden, Suez and Port Said before arriving in Naples. Pretty seasick and homesick for the first few days, I recovered after our first port of call and enjoyed the rest of the trip. In the dining room I had been placed at a large English-speaking table (most tables were Italian-speaking, with a few where Dutch or German predominated); others at the table were Lorna and Wendy, two girls of my age from New Zealand, both librarians setting off on a working holiday in the UK; Jeff, a young chap from the back blocks of NSW doing the same; Aldona, a vivacious 30-something Lithuanian mother and her seven-year-old daughter, Vida, travelling to the USA via Europe to join her husband (he was a doctor, but his Lithuanian degree had not been recognised when he had arrived in Australia so he had moved to Chicago, where it was); Hakim, a cheerful Lebanese chap fluent in French and English as well as in Arabic who was going home to Beirut on holiday and I think to find a bride; and Madame Zanetti, an elderly French-speaking Swiss lady returning home to Switzerland after visiting her married daughter who was then living with her husband and children in New Caledonia. A nearby table was made up of a similar mix of mostly young, English-speaking passengers and we tended to make a loose and relaxed group of friends around the pool, on the deck, in the lounge bar after dinner and at the dances, races, cinema shows and other entertainments on board. The ship did only seventeen knots and the voyage took nearly a month, so there was plenty of time to get to know one another.
This was a new and very strange social experience for me, as I had attended all-boys secondary schools and an all-male university college, and had lived a very close family life where conforming to my parents’ presumed expectations of my behaviour had always been the only thing to do. On the Australia there were few constraints – I sensed that it was an opportunity for me to act as an independent, mature adult … but what do such people do? Leaning on the ship’s rail in the moonlight, watching the flying fish leaping through the ship’s bow-wave, dancing under the stars to the strains of the ship’s orchestra (often playing Neapolitan love songs) was certainly wonderful, but did it make me feel ‘romantic’? What does a ‘shipboard romance’ mean? I really was not at all sure, my head being full of ideas absorbed from the innumerable romantic, adventure and escapist novels I had read, ideas which, while exciting, may well have been unrealistic. I may have been book-wise, but certainly was not streetwise. Being by nature cautious rather than impulsive, I probably erred on the side of shyness. I was very attracted to one of the New Zealand girls whose repartee I greatly enjoyed and who had a dazzling smile, big lustrous brown eyes, a generous figure and, with a dash of Maori blood, wonderful honey-coloured skin. But my mixture of social timidity, ignorance and caution meant that I did not plunge into any sort of shipboard romance. I had never kissed a girl, and was not going to start out in the middle of the ocean where I might not be able to control subsequent events.
We arrived safely in Naples in mid-September and after a few days there a group of us went on together by train to Rome. After a further few days of sightseeing, our little party broke up and we all went our several ways, I making my way by train to Paris. A French missionary priest who had travelled with us on the Australia had recommended that while in Paris I stay in the famous ‘No.104’ university hostel in the rue de Vaugirard run by the Marist Fathers and which counted François Mauriac and François Mitterand among its past students. I took his advice and stayed there for two weeks before taking the train to Bordeaux, to my posting at the Lycée Michel Montaigne. The priests and students at No. 104 seemed to mix together much more easily and pleasantly than had been the case at Newman, and although I was only de passage or in transit for two weeks, I found that every day someone or other would speak to me and proffer advice about sightseeing in Paris or about walking around the Latin Quarter where No. 104 was, or would question me in a friendly fashion about Australia and my trip to Europe, just making sure that I felt that someone in that big, new city cared about me. I quickly took in the major sights – Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and so on – and would discuss my day’s sightseeing over the evening meal with those students who sat near me and could understand my then execrable French. What I did not discuss with them was my urge to go to Montmartre and to explore Paris’s legendary nightlife.
Early one evening I did get as far as the foyers of both the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergères, but while the glamorous posters certainly attracted me, the cost of entry tickets was well beyond my very limited budget. As I walked disconsolately away, I noticed a number of attractively dressed women loitering in the nearby streets. After a few tries I was able to understand what they were saying to passing males. They were offering un peu de bonheur, ‘a good time’! I eventually picked out one who did not look quite as alarmingly painted and professional as the others and asked her the price. It seemed just affordable.
When I did not pull away she said, ‘Alors, je vous emmène?’ I replied ‘Oui,’ and she led me to a nearby rather sleazy little hotel where the male concierge gave us a casual glance and scribbled something in a notebook as we walked towards the stairs. My ‘lady of the night’ opened the door of a large, dim bedroom with furnishings in Belle Époque style, quite possibly dating from that period. It was her working area, presumably rented by the hour or even half-hour.
She waved me in. ‘Take off your shoes,’ she said, in wellmodulated and easily understood French, and proceeded to do the same herself and then to squat over a bidet and give her working parts a quick rinse. I had never seen a bidet before (there was no plumbing in the rather spartan rooms at No. 104) and had never seen a woman do that before. But I realised I was expected to follow suit, and did so, leaving shoes, socks, trousers and underpants on the floor but keeping the rest of my clothes on, as she had done. By this time elle was lying on the bed waiting for me. I went to climb on too – she seemed just a little bit impatient – when she stopped me short with: ‘You’ve got something to give me, haven’t you?’ I must have shown my confusion at this, not sure whether she was speaking metaphorically or factually, so she then explained very clearly, ‘That will be 100 francs’ or whatever the charge was. Don’t squeeze the fruit until you have paid for it! as the signs used to say in Australian fruit shops.
I found the money, put it on the bedside table, climbed onto the bed and away we went. ‘Do you mind if we turn off the light?’ I asked, finding the situation not quite as romantic as I had hoped.
‘Is it your first time, chéri?’ she asked, and when I confessed that it was (almost) she agreed and turned the lights down, but not off. She took a drag on a cigarette she had lit while I was undressing, then put it out and looked in a ho-hum sort of way to see if I was making any progress. I was, despite her lack of enthusiasm, and it was all over even faster than it had been with His Highness in our back garden. In next to no time we were washed up, re-dressed and back on the street.
I walked all the way back across the city to the rue de Vaugirard, to save on the Métro fare and to sort out my thoughts. On arriving, I headed straight for the showers and washed and washed and washed. How stupid could I be! What a waste of money! What a risk I had taken, in terms of health and of being mugged by an accomplice! Talk about balls ruling brains! And if that was all having sex with a woman in romantic Gay Paree amounted to, I wasn’t interested. Masturbation was better, safer and cheaper … and I have never been back to Montmartre or to any of its imitations since!
After two or three weeks in Paris I took the train to Bordeaux and my job at the Lycée Michel Montaigne. The Lycée was near the centre of the city, close to one of the remaining mediaeval gates, and was housed in a rather grand eighteenth-century building originally built as a Jesuit college. It was a prestigious institution, offering the final three years of secondary schooling leading to the Baccalauréat as well as the post-Bac classes préparatoires in which students prepared themselves to sit the concours or competitive entrance examinations of the grandes écoles such as the École Polytechnique, the École Normale Supérieure and the École Nationale d’Administration. There were a thousand or so students there, 300 of them living in, as did I and the other assistants and surveillants.39
I enrolled at the university which was just a short stroll away, bought a beret Basque, wore black corduroy trousers and a suede jacket like my peers, and felt that I really was making progress with my French. However, the experience of living far away from my family and in an environment which, though endlessly interesting, was nonetheless quite different and in some ways almost alien, was unsettling.
So it turned out that religion was one of the things that helped me feel at home and secure in France. These were pre-Vatican II40 times, and Sunday Mass in Bordeaux was exactly the same as Sunday Mass in Melbourne … said entirely in Latin, the priest wearing the same sort of vestments in the familiar liturgical colours, the choir and organist using the same music (mostly Palestrina or Gregorian). The sermon was of course in French and instead of being a boring interruption of the ritual it became for me an excellent opportunity to hear well-articulated and carefully prepared spoken French. So I became a regular churchgoer (to the amusement of many of my student friends, most of whom were rather anti-clerical), even going to additional services when I thought the music or the preacher or the architecture of the particular church warranted it. I came to find comfort in talking about what to do with my life with an elderly canon of the cathedral, sometimes at the cathedral and sometimes in his rooms at a nearby convent where he lived as the chaplain. By the end of the academic year I had decided that I should give the religious life a try: perhaps my father had been right in thinking that I would make a priest, perhaps my aunt had been right about the ‘Hound of Heaven’. I told my ghostly father that I thought I would ask to join the Cistercians,41 or more precisely the Trappists42 and sought his advice as to which abbey to contact. He advised me not to settle on an abbey in France, saying that the language and the different culture would constitute additional difficulties to those already awaiting me in the religious life. He suggested that instead I should contact the Trappist abbey in Ireland which had just opened a daughter house in Australia, in which he thought I would have the best chance of successfully adapting my life to the demands and routine of monastic life. As a result, when the end of the first year came around, I advised the French authorities that I did not want to take up the year in Paris that they had offered me and I set off for Ireland.
The best-known Cistercian/Trappist abbey in Ireland was Mt Melleray, near Waterford, and when I arrived there unannounced one day the place was in turmoil, the guesthouse full and overflowing, and I was advised to head for the ‘daughter’ abbey, Mt St Joseph, at Roscrea in County Tipperary. The cause of the fuss was that the old abbot had died and I had arrived on the day before his funeral, which was to be attended by every priest and bishop in Ireland who could get a bed in or near the abbey and by hundreds of other well-wishers from all over the country. So I made my way to Roscrea and was welcomed at the abbey guesthouse, and a day or two later was able to talk with the abbot of Mt St Joseph on his return from the proceedings at Mt Melleray. The abbot eventually agreed to accept me as a novice, suggesting at first that I go to Mt St Joseph’s daughter abbey in Scotland, near Edinburgh, where the abbot was apparently a distant kinsman on my father’s side. But he then decided that Scotland would be too cold for me and I would do better in Australia. He had at first thought to accept me as a novice there and then at Mt St Joseph, and to send me out to the Australian foundation after a year or two, but finally decided to recommend that I ‘remain in the world for another year’ to see if I was really sure about my decision. He urged me to return to Australia, to complete my studies (which needed another year to qualify me fully as a teacher), to think the matter over carefully and then, if I still wanted to proceed, to contact the Novice Master at the new abbey not far from Melbourne with a view to joining the order in Australia. I followed his advice, returned to Melbourne by ship and resumed both teaching and teacher training.
Towards the end of the school year I went out to the new abbey at Tarrawarra, in the hills 60 or so kilometres east of Melbourne, discussed my situation with the Novice Master there, and applied to join up in the following year. My family and friends accepted my decision and announcement quietly, all of them, I am sure, wanting me to do whatever would make me happy. My mother, I know, was unhappy with the idea, but she tried to keep her views to herself and to let me work things out for myself. Her sister, Nell, and her youngest brother, Bert, my uncle and aunt, were both much more open in their scepticism, not just of my decision but, by then, of the whole idea of the religious life and of religion itself.
The abbey at Tarrawarra was located in a beautiful part of the Yarra Valley, where the river gurgled and swirled in a rather shallow bed between tree-lined banks and where the mountain walls of the valley began to close in and seemed to point the way to the near-perfect peak of Mt St Leonard at the top of the valley. The monks had bought several hundred acres of grazing country along with a rambling wooden farmhouse and adjoining shedding, and had quickly built a simple wooden church, a big dormitory, an ablutions block and several lecture/study rooms. The collection of buildings looked like a very poor cousin indeed of the architectural wonders of the great, stone French and Irish abbeys but, perhaps surprisingly, my enthusiasm and idealism seemed to transport me far above such mundane considerations. There was already a piece of land next to the newly-built church which had been carefully fenced off and designated as the monastic cemetery. A simple white wooden cross marked the grave of the first Irish monk to have died at Tarrawarra. I silently agreed with one of the other novices who, when asked in class by the Novice Master what his ambitions were, said that he hoped to spend his life as a good monk in the monastery and to be buried there in the little graveyard with his monastic brothers. He in fact did achieve this ambition, but I did not.
I had joined the monks in the abbey on Easter Sunday and stayed until the middle of the following year. The regular life, simple and rather spartan as it was, with the day structured around the celebration of the Mass, the singing of the Divine Office in Latin (this was just prior to the changes brought in at the end of Vatican II), the wonderful Gregorian chant, the beautiful and ageless ceremonies, the silence and peace, interspersed with study and work on the farm, seemed to suit me, and I was happier there than I had been for many years. With the agreement of the Novice Master, I wrote briefly to the old canon in Bordeaux telling him that I had indeed made it to the monastery and was very happy. He responded with a short note and the phrase that I still remember: vous voilà au port … ‘you’re safely in harbour now’.
Even now I can recall an afternoon soon after receiving the canon’s note when I had been kneeling alone in the abbey church ‘lost in prayer’, as the saying goes. I had, I think, been meditating on the motto Ubi Caritas Ibi Deus,43 and within the space of fifteen minutes or so was so overcome with a feeling of happiness and gratitude to God for having brought me safely to the monastic life that tears of joy started to run down my face. A bell rang and I had to leave the church for some other duty. As I rose to go another monk, the choirmaster, suddenly appeared from around a corner. Seeing the happiness on my face, he broke the rule which counselled against unnecessary communication between monks and with a broad smile made the Trappist sign of ‘joy’ to me. I responded with the sign for ‘thank you’. Mental prayer had not come easily to me in the monastery and that afternoon was an extraordinarily uplifting, even ecstatic experience. I walked on air as I hurried off to weed the vegetable garden or scrub out the showers or whatever task it was that called me.
The feeling of divine consolation faded only slowly over the ensuing few days. But a day eventually came when I lost my temper over some trivial matter, pretended conviction that sensible men in the twentieth century could not be expected to observe the detail of a rule written in the eleventh century, and declared that I did not want to spend another day there. I was quietly helped to calm down, with assurances that I would be helped to catch the first train to town next morning if that was my wish … and that is what I did. My mother (whom the monks had telephoned once I was on the way back to town on the morning train) welcomed me home without any ‘I told you so’, as did everyone else, and within a few days I was back into teaching, paying my way, and saving for a car. I had given the religious life a try, and it had not worked out.
I have nothing but happy memories of my time in the monastery, my one regret being the shock and unpleasantness for the other monks resulting from my outburst. I went back a couple of weeks later, apologised and parted on good terms with the monks. In retrospect now I consider the time spent with them to have been not just one of the happiest parts of my life but also one of the most useful and fruitful. That is when I finally grasped what my parents and others had been trying to teach me, that the most important thing in life is love. That is when I learned that the fundamental teaching of the church is to love God, not to fear Him. The monk is taught that in loving God, the Creator and Father, in believing that the acceptance of His will is the true recipe for happiness, each monk must, on entering the monastery, leave behind him his own will and his own plans for his own happiness. The lesson of the monastery is to simplify things, to get back to basics, to love one another. Although I did not last very long as a monk and although my doubts about the value of organised religion and indeed about the very existence of God soon began to grow, I continued, and still continue, to think that simple is better than complex, that love is a better motivator than fear … and that threats of eternal punishment, Hell and so on, are not a sound basis for any sort of moral code.
To my surprise, giving up masturbation had proved no problem at all in the monastery but once outside I soon fell back into my old habits. The twin problems of what to do with my life and how to have a satisfactory sex life were back with a vengeance. The most eminent psychiatrist in the city happened to live next door to my mother and she mentioned that, recently retired and a devout Catholic, he had begun giving free consultations to religious and ex-religious in need of counselling. I classified myself as one of the latter and made an appointment to see him professionally. Taking a big breath I told him the whole story and, just like the elderly canon in Bordeaux, he never batted an eyelid. I concluded by saying that I just didn’t know whether I was homosexual or heterosexual or something in between. He laughed and said, in a nutshell, ‘Well, John, what do you want to be?’
I replied that I would like to be like most people, i.e. heterosexual, and to be able to get married and have children, and he replied, ‘Well, you can! You can choose which way you want to go, and if that is indeed what you want, then go and find yourself a wife, have your children and everything will be fine.’ Even all those years ago I sensed that this was fairly avant-garde advice, as many psychiatrists were at that time treating homosexuality (then still listed as a crime in many countries) as a sickness which could often be ‘cured’ by medication and even by electric shock treatment. It had been the possibility of such a course of treatment being proposed that had made me so nervous about making the appointment in the first place. So with a much jauntier step I returned home (next door) and started making general plans for a heterosexual future. In retrospect, I now believe that while he was avant-garde and liberal in his attitude towards homosexuality, the good doctor was wrong in thinking that my lifestyle was still, at that stage of life, simply a matter of choice. I think now that the die was already cast and that a heterosexual life was no longer, in fact, a possibility for me.
In the following year I went back to the university to continue my studies while teaching at the junior secondary level. In the first part of the year I spent a few months ‘going steady’ with a very nice girl (yes, she was the daughter of family friends) but by mutual agreement the friendship ended without us ever going beyond some pleasantly passionate kissing one weekend on a picnic at Hanging Rock.
To keep fit (or was there some ulterior motive such as a predilection for the ‘eye candy’ available in a gym?) I had enrolled at a popular all-male gym in the city and began training there on one or two evenings a week. After a while I discovered that the gym’s sauna was at times used for ‘cruising’, i.e. for picking up playmates for sexual activity once one had left the gym. I did not resist the temptation for very long and my weekly workout was often followed by a casual encounter of this sort. One evening I went off with a middle-aged but fit and good-looking chap who took me to a flat in an inner suburb which he used as a studio. He was an enthusiastic but not very skilled painter and his tactic had been to say that he wanted to sketch me (I was then around 27 and in good shape … and was ready to believe any story, I suppose.) The sketch did not progress very far before we abandoned it for straight sex. The sex didn’t really work for me and I left as soon as I politely could … and politely said ‘no thanks’ when subsequent invitations were issued at the gym in the following weeks. Imagine my surprise when a few months later the same man, dressed this time in a black clerical suit, turned up in the staff room of the Catholic school in which I was teaching. I was presented to him as a new staff member and he was introduced to me as the Director of one of the archdiocese’s welfare offices. My face must have shown my surprise and shock and he smoothly said that he felt we had already met at some diocesan function in the past.
I left the room as quickly as I could and that evening began a difficult bout of soul-searching. What should I do? I was not worried that he would reveal my secret homosexuality or that he might try to use the threat of doing so to persuade me to go to his studio again. I really had the upper hand, as I could do far more damage to him than he could to me. Should I reveal to the church authorities that the priest they had put in charge of their counselling bureau was a practising homosexual? Would they believe me? Did it matter? Would his homosexuality necessarily affect his counselling or administrative abilities (he had a number of male and female staff members helping run the office).
After a few days I decided that I just had to get priestly advice, and to avoid going to a diocesan priest (who might automatically defend another diocesan priest) I went to the Franciscan monastery in Kew. There, in the anonymity and secrecy of confession, I explained my problem: I had committed a sin of homosexuality with a priest who was in charge of an important diocesan counselling service – should I tell someone or should I suggest to the priest that he himself speak up? The elderly friar to whom I spoke hesitated for a while and then suggested that I do nothing. ‘Leave it to God,’ he said, ‘and try not to sin again yourself. That man may be particularly able to help people like you.’ Although not quite sure what he had meant by ‘help people like you’, I accepted the advice to be cautious; I didn’t tell anyone, and I did try not to sin again myself … but I was far from comfortable with the old friar’s final comment and wondered how on earth my partner in sin could help others when he himself was in such strife. Within the year, however, the other sinner was transferred to other duties and not long thereafter death itself had claimed him. I was left to wonder whether the old Franciscan knew more about contacts and pulling strings than I had realised.
At the end of the year I spent the summer holidays with four other male teacher colleagues on a six-week trip by ship to Tahiti and other Pacific islands.44 They were all very ‘straight’, and apart from a few jokes about our need of bromide tablets or of some other treatment to lower frustrated libido, there was no sex and no talk of sex. The following year I spent the summer holidays in New Caledonia, attending a course for Australian and New Zealand language teachers given by a team of university lecturers sent to Noumea from the Sorbonne in Paris. Although it was a co-ed course and there were teachers from all over Australasia there, I didn’t succeed in finding romance.
At the end of the year, with the Diploma of Education completed and with my appetite for French studies truly whetted, I decided to go to Europe again and to really work on my French so that I could aspire to become a truly competent French teacher on my return.
The P&O Line offered a sailing on the day the term ended in December, so accepting convenience as more important than cuisine (there were Italian and French sailings available but not until later in the month) I boarded the brand new Canberra and sailed away. After a few days of stop-over in Egypt so that I could visit Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, I then boarded the Orient Line’s Orsova at Port Said for the last leg of the trip, arriving in Marseille in early January. I tried to find work as a teacher (of English) both there and a few days later in Paris but was unsuccessful, as the school year and indeed the winter term were already well under way in France. I did, however, manage to register as an applicant for any position as an English teacher becoming available in the next school year, i.e. in the following September, and decided to retreat to England where I felt confident that I would be able to pick up work as a relief teacher at junior secondary level even though the term had commenced.
While in Paris I bought a copy of a Danish gay magazine printed in Danish, French and English. After enjoying the stories and pictures, I decided to answer an advertisement for a male model. Yes, again! This time the photographer turned out to be a 30-something rather handsome Moroccan, who had a studio on the slightly seedy Boulevard de Sebastopol. He wanted to do some erotic studies beginning with two men wrestling. Eric, his regular in-house model, a fair-haired Norman of about my own age and build, was there on stand-by and I was invited to strip off for a few test shots, in which I simply stood still, looked at the camera and felt a bit foolish. I passed the tests and was offered the job and a few thousand francs for three hours work. The money would be useful and the work seemed likely to be easy, so I agreed.
The setting was simply a black backdrop, a black rubber mat on the floor and a couple of fake Greek or Roman pillars on each side. The front of the stage/scene was a mass of lights, cameras, heaters (it was winter) and cables – I wondered whether it would be possible to feel sexy in such unromantic and prosaic surroundings. But the photographer knew his job and kept up a friendly and mildly erotic banter while, at his instruction, we carefully oiled each other’s body from top to toe before stepping on to the wrestling mat for our first shots. Neither of us really knew anything about wrestling and the first few clinches served merely to warm us up, spread oil everywhere … and see us both with fine erections. We were then carefully posed for a number of different shots taken from various angles and showing everything but the erections. This was so time-consuming that eventually there were no erections to conceal, so several full frontal but flaccid shots were taken.
After the break we were invited to get together again for some ‘69’ shots, and these went off pretty satisfactorily with both of us being careful not to get too carried away. Then we were asked to do a few more wrestling shots, the ‘winner’ to pin the ‘loser’ to the mat. To my surprise I found myself pinning Eric to the mat after a bit of grappling … whether as a result of my strength/skill or of the photographer’s secret instructions to Eric I will never know.
My prize was that the loser was rolled over on to his stomach and I was invited to fuck him. Under the floodlights and with the camera clicking. I was surprised and a bit stunned, having expected nothing more than mutual masturbation to have come at the end. How on earth did one fuck a man? Could I fuck a man? My hesitation was apparently not taken as anything more than a pause for more oil to be applied and for Eric to push his backside up so that I could see and reach my target … his arse. Applying the oil to my cock soon had it ready for action and taking that as a sign that I could do what was expected of me, I climbed on board. But then I learned that this was not going to be a quick ‘WWW’, ‘whip it in, whip it out and wipe it’ job. My employer was there on the floor beside me with his camera, directing every movement, instructing me where to put my legs, my hands and my cock to such an extent that I feared I would lose my head of steam and be unable to perform. But again, he knew his job and judged very nicely just how long he could click away on ‘approach shots’ before giving me the go ahead. This was clearly not a first time for Eric. I had expected some resistance from his sphincter muscles and feared that I would hurt him and that he might yell out in pain. Nothing of the sort happened. Eric put one hand around behind him to guide me in, my cock slid in like a loose cork into a bottle, and Eric gave a little grunt of oui, c’est bon! Then of course our employer took over again. There were shots of going in and of coming out, half way, two thirds way and so on, and then Eric was turned over onto his back, his legs placed on my shoulders, and the whole procedure was shot all over again. That both Eric and I remained hard for all that time amazed me, as did the fact that I was able to enjoy the fucking without exploding into inappropriately early orgasm.
Eventually enough shots had been taken, the three hours were up and the session was over. Eric and I lay on the floor and quickly masturbated; I had been terrified that I might shoot my load while fucking him and although this all happened long before the AIDS crisis, I had a serious aversion to any contact with bodily excretions. We then got up, cleaned up as best we could, and I was paid and ready to leave. I lingered a bit hoping, I think, that Eric would say something about seeing me again … but he did not. Nor did the photographer. I was just a stranger who had served the purpose and was no longer needed. So I set off back to my hotel, a bit richer but not much wiser.
I was still far from understanding my own sexuality. Why had I done that? Did I enjoy that more than my experience of sex with women? What path in life was I really choosing?
I think I took the job partly for the money and partly for the anticipated sexual contact. I was unemployed and was looking for work, in France if possible. There were no teaching positions available at the time and so the only real alternative was unskilled work such as the job of plongeur (washing dishes in a restaurant kitchen) or the ‘modelling’ one I took. I had already come to the view that modelling or posing, clad or unclad, was not inherently wicked. Indeed my whole mindset of what was good and bad, harmful and helpful, my moral code, was under revision and I was far from sure at that stage whether I was a theist, atheist, Christian, Catholic, humanist or plain hedonist.
I did feel sure that we are entitled to use whatever part of the body we choose to earn a living, whether it was our brains or brawn or even our balls. The men and women who model for Armani, Dior, St Laurent and even Calvin Klein and so on know quite well that it is their projection of sexuality that sells the items they advertise. They are not criticised for looking alluring. Yet there often is something that could be criticised in these advertisements, an element of dishonesty, in the implication that the dress or watch or underclothes or aftershave advertised will be just as alluring on the purchaser as on the model, and indeed that the purchaser will, by wearing the product, look just as alluring as the model. But instead of being accused of working in a basically dishonest industry, a ‘top model’ is likely to be a national hero/heroine … and a millionaire. Similarly, but to a lesser extent I suspect, the figure models who pose for painters, sculptors and photographers are accepted as working in the ‘art’ industry rather than in the sex industry … but does anybody seriously contend that Michelangelo’s ‘David’ and Manet’s ‘Olympe’ are copied and admired around the world as art? They and similar works are famous for their beauty, and surely their beauty is their nakedness and potential sexiness. What part of ‘David’ would be most looked at? His hands? His face? His head? Go on now, it is his penis, and the comments one overhears in galleries around the world would suggest that we are most of us size queens: ‘Oh, isn’t it small!’
So I was quite relaxed about the idea of being photographed in sexual situations and in the resulting photographs being sold to buyers who would enjoy looking at them. And for the work to pay me cash and at the same time to give me some sex made it quite an attractive proposition. The disappointment was that there was no offer of follow-up engagements (or of more sex with Eric) … and so working in England until the French teaching positions came up in September seemed to have become inevitable.
A few days later I took the train from the Gare du Nord to Calais and then the ferry to Dover. It was a rough winter crossing with most passengers, including me, being seasick and quite terrified by the violent pitching and rolling of the ship. It was with an immense sigh of relief that I finally set foot on English soil and caught the boat train up to London.
Once there I soon found digs in one of those innumerable small hotels near Victoria Station and next day went around to the London Education Authority. There I put my name down as an applicant for a temporary teacher position, went back to my hotel room and waited. After a couple of days with no job offers and many empty hours of sitting reading in my room I went to the bookstall at Victoria Station and bought a copy of the nearest thing to a gay magazine then allowed in England … I think it was called Health and Beauty or something similar. There was a small ad which caught my eye, an advertisement by a photographer in London seeking male models! I had no illusions about being good-looking but my experience in Paris had taught me that some photographers were not principally interested in the model’s face. So I hand-delivered an application and within a day or so was called up for interview. The photographer turned out to be the best-known ‘soft porn’ man in the game in the UK, and I had already seen some of his work in magazines both in Australia and in London. He was a pleasant fellow in his early sixties, lived in a rather smart, white-painted, four-storey Edwardian townhouse near Victoria, and had transformed one floor of the house into a large, bright, well equipped studio.
‘Well, let’s have a look at you,’ he said, and so I took my clothes off and stepped into the floodlit studio centre. Happily, the whole house was pleasantly warm from the central heating … this was London, in January. ‘Well, let’s be frank,’ he said. ‘You haven’t got the looks of a movie star and there are plenty of young chaps around who have. But you’ve got a good body and you’ve got that wonderful tan! That tan has got you the job, if you want it.’
I had left Australia in early summer, in December, and had spent four weeks on the ship mostly sunbaking around the pool, and had forgotten that I had indeed worked up quite a bit of colour: the white vee where my Speedos had prevented any tanning heightened the contrast and seemed to deepen the tan. Anyway, the man who mattered liked it, and that was what was important. I was invited to come back the next day for a three-hour session at so many pounds sterling an hour, and I agreed.
Next day saw me on the job for a 9 a.m. start. This time, as well as the photographer, there were two young chaps. To my slight disappointment I was the only one told to undress. The two young guys were both ‘technical assistants’ although I got the impression that they both lived in the house and with the photographer as his live-in protégés and models. Perhaps sensing my interest he added something like: ‘Oh, I don’t have sex with the young fellows now. Past all that. Give myself the occasional Wellington now and then, and that’s enough!’
The shots were all to be solo ones, with an endless series of lighting and pose changes and with various props and even items of clothing being used. I had to be carefully and very lightly oiled all over and my longish wavy hair had to be groomed and sprayset into position. I wore Roman greaves and sandals and carried a sword and shield; I had the net, trident and helmet of a gladiator; I wore an Egyptian kilt and pharaoh’s head-dress; I had Speedos and a beach towel; I was Mercury with golden winged sandals … and I was just a 28-year-old guy with a tan and an erection. Some of the shots were ‘art’ ones and some were erotic ones. I found that being the centre of attention like that, with all lights, eyes and cameras focused on me, was exciting and arousing, and the team made clever use of ‘down’ time to do the more artistic shots and then they were ready for something raunchy when I was up again! I was surprised when ‘Finish up now’ was called, the time had flown so fast.
I was shown into the quite luxurious living quarters of the house and showered and then found that a place had been set at table for me and a very fine lunch which included a dessert of fresh strawberries and cream (in mid-winter) was to be part of the deal. All three Londoners were very pleasant fellows, a little bit condescending to a mere colonial, but that was understandable and even tolerable, as I was paid handsomely for a very pleasant morning’s work. There was no sex and, more disappointingly still, it was made plain that they had ‘got the tan’ and that there would be no more work for me in the foreseeable future!
Back at my hotel I counted my money and thought over the morning’s adventure. Was this the sort of life I wanted to lead? Would I like to be, in my sixties, a wrinkly old bachelor with lots of money and a fine house and no wife, no children and no sex other than ‘the occasional Wellington’? All things considered, no. Choosing the gay life, let alone the life of a porn model, seemed likely to bring more long-term loneliness than happiness and so once again I decided to try to follow the good old doctor’s advice and ‘choose to be normal’.
But, a little like St Augustine of Hippo and his famous struggle to renounce the sins of the flesh, I wanted to be normal … ‘but not just yet’! I had answered a second ad in the magazine bought at the kiosk in Victoria Station, another ad for a male model, contacted the advertiser and arranged for him to meet me in the reception area of the hotel the following afternoon. I decided not to cancel the arrangement and so next day when the Reception Desk rang my room to announce a visitor I went downstairs to meet him.
To my surprise he was a very personable chap not much older than me; he said his name was Thomas and to call him Tom. It took him very little time to decide to offer me a few hours work if I could be available that very evening. I agreed, and a few hours later took the tube to Sloane Square and walked to Tom’s mews flat, a small but comfortable place off Eaton Terrace. This time my employer made it plain that the photo studies were for his own collection rather than for any sort of circulation, though how a model could hold an employer to such an agreement I neither saw nor cared. I quite liked the chap and would probably have been happy to call around and ‘work’ unpaid.
The large ground-floor living room of the flat was almost blindingly white: white ceiling, white walls, white doors and architraves, heavy white linen curtains and thick white carpet. There were no paintings or photographs or decorations of any sort on the walls. There was a shiny black grand piano at the baywindow end of the room and in one corner behind it, an incongruously large aspidistra on a shiny black plant-stand. A jumble of photographic gear lay on the floor and a tripod was positioned next to the piano. At the other end of the room there was a quite tall set of chrome steps and behind it a black and silver folding lacquered screen. It looked much more like an artist’s or pianist’s studio than a living room and I wondered whether there were more comfortable living quarters upstairs.
When he opened the door to me Tom was wearing black silk trousers and a white silk shirt. Without further ado he motioned for me to go into the small bathroom under the stairs and ‘leave your things’. I did as I was being paid to do and then joined him in the living room where he was fiddling with his camera and lights. He took me through a series of poses, explaining in detail how I was to stand or kneel or lie in front of the lacquered screen, and then another series where I was to lean against or climb up the set of steps. It was more complicated and more difficult than I had expected, and all very business-like – not at all erotic. I felt I was being deployed like a piece of furniture or an aspidistra rather than as a hunky male model and I remained flaccid or barely half-hard all the time. Finally he seemed satisfied that I had understood what was expected of me and, leaving me posed on the steps, Tom picked up his camera, adjusted the lighting and started clicking. We must have done twenty or so shots with the steps before I was directed to move across to the screen and to assume my first pose there, one where I was to half-sit, half-lie on the floor in front of the screen, my right foot under my left buttock, my right arm bent at the elbow with the weight of my torso supported by my right forearm, and my left arm lying on my left leg. As I moved across the room Tom tossed a black silk kimono towards me with the instruction ‘Put this on but don’t tie the sash’. I did as I was told and made myself comfortable on the floor. Tom adjusted the lighting, came over and rearranged the folds of the kimono so that the black silk on the white carpet highlighted the tan of my body, made sure that I was comfortable enough to hold the pose … and clicked away, taking shots from different angles including from halfway up the set of steps.
Unlike the other two photographers, Tom worked quietly, almost silently, with just a ‘Next pose’ every few minutes. Once posed on the floor, however, I did not have to change pose or move at all: it was the camera, the angle of shot and the lighting that changed. Suddenly there was a new and by then unexpected instruction: ‘Now play with yourself with your left hand and show me that erection’. I obliged of course and with a ‘Now stay like that,’ Tom put down the camera, sat at the piano and started to play. He played very well. He had dimmed the lights and played without sheet music, swaying gently to and fro, looking towards me all the time but seeming at times to drift off to some less substantial world. I realised that he was playing Debussy’s ‘L’Après-midi d’un Faune’ and wondered whether I really did look something like a faun there on the carpet. The thought was quite erotic, as had become the whole scene, and I was not surprised when at the end of the Prelude Tom stopped, stood up and moved over towards me. He dropped his silk trousers as he walked, revealing his own arousal.
My mercenary mind started asking: ‘Was this part of the deal?’ and ‘Are you a model or a hustler or both?’ Tom was on his knees beside me, shaking off his silk shirt and brushing his hands across my chest and belly as they came free of the fabric. Cocks cannot lie and both were now rock-hard. An instant decision was needed! As Tom moved his hand down to my groin I brought my left hand into play, protecting the crown jewels and said softly, ‘No, I’m sorry. Photos, yes, but sex, no.’
The effect was as if I had touched him with an electric cattleprod; he jerked back, rolled away from me and started to get up, as did I. ‘But why did you answer my advertisement, why did you come here and flaunt your sex in my face if you are not willing to play? I’m paying you the rate we agreed. Do you charge more for sex than for photographs?’
It was all so confusing. The dim lights, the beautiful music, the simple, masculine setting and Tom’s trim body were indeed quite erotic and I wanted to have sex with him. But something seemed to warn me against accepting money for sex. Off the top of my head I answered: ‘If we have finished the photography, pay me for those two hours and that’s the end of the work. If you’d like me to stay on for sex between friends, I’d love to.’
‘Friends!’ he almost shouted. ‘You’re not a friend, you’re a prostitute. You answered my advertisement and I’m paying you by the hour. What on earth is the matter with you to think that we could be friends! Take your money and get out!’
Bewildered by the change of mood I retrieved my clothes, dressed quickly and headed for the door. Tom held out a handful of banknotes which I quickly saw did cover the agreed rate for the two hours. I accepted them and he immediately withdrew his hand as if fearing I might attempt to touch (or subserviently kiss?) it, opened the door and almost ejected me from the flat.
I decided to walk back to my little hotel near Victoria and set off down Buckingham Palace Road. It was cold but fortunately not raining and I thought carefully as I walked along. What had happened there? If I had not interrupted him, Tom would probably have kept me on for another hour or two, or maybe even longer, and then have paid me cash in hand for the number of hours worked … whatever kind of work had been involved. I was quite happy to be paid for the modelling but had rather impulsively resisted the idea of being paid for sex. I had wanted the sex but had wanted it to be sex between friends rather than between employer and employee, between client and (I shuddered at the word) prostitute. How could he call me a prostitute? Well, he could not have known that he was the very first person who had offered me payment for sex (give or take the Viennese photographer in Melbourne and the Moroccan photographer in Paris) and so I forgave him his mistake.
But was he mistaken? If I had stayed on and had accepted his further payment, then there would be no denying that that would have constituted prostitution. Was I ready for that career, perhaps on a part-time if not a full-time basis? I was not yet 30, in good shape and apparently not unattractive, I was keen to get a good share of sex in my life and was not really averse to being appreciated in cash or in kind. Many successful and respectable marriages were built on such a foundation, I had come to realise. But while I found it difficult to identify moral objections to working as a prostitute, I saw several physical ones. For a start, it was illegal in many countries and so arrest and imprisonment were possible consequences. Secondly, it could see one run the risk of physical harm, whether from brutish clients or from street gangs or vigilante groups. And a gay prostitute seemed to be in a more vulnerable position than a straight one. Thirdly, it seemed to increase the health hazards faced in life and fourthly it was likely to be a socially damaging and isolating choice of career: many a prostitute had come to grief once deprived of the support of socially well-placed clients … Mme du Barry’s rendezvous with the guillotine came to mind!
It had been a strange evening: I had made some money, had been called a prostitute, had had a long walk and some useful exercise … and had made some little progress in working out what to do, or what not to do, with my life!