After nearly eight years of bashing politicians over the head with sex and morality issues, I was starting to feel burned out. The exhaustive Non-Violent Erotica (NVE) campaign had not ended with a bang but a long whimper. Through the campaign with Andrew Robb we had saved porn from an outright ban, but we hadn’t been able to get the new NVE classification over the line. Without renaming the X classification as something else we were always going to have a fight on our hands. In some ways, Senator Harradine had outsmarted us, though it still felt like we had gone twenty rounds only to land knockout blows on each other in the last round.
A reprieve of sorts arrived when a young woman called Sharon Austen knocked on my door in early 2000. She had just launched Australia’s second adult company on the Australian Stock Exchange and wanted to join Eros. Sharon had been a well-known and well-liked brothel madam in Sydney and together with her stockbroker boyfriend had designed a public float for a new adult company with great ideas but not a lot else. They had raised $6 million, however, and were ready to go.
Before they began to trade, they travelled to Europe to check the progress of the German adult company, Beate Uhse AG, following its launch on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 1999. The woman who founded that company, Beate Uhse, had been one of the youngest stunt pilots in Germany before joining the Luftwaffe at the beginning of the Second World War. After the war, she started a mail-order business in condoms and sex education books that quickly grew into a large company. In 1962, she opened the world’s first retail sex shop and despite repeated raids by German police for corrupting public morals, the Beate Uhse brand spread quickly throughout the country.
Sharon wanted to bring that same mainstream approach to adult retailing in Australia—and from there to the rest of world. Beate Uhse AG’s chain of adult stores, initially based on the high streets of Germany, were starting to perform well online. Sharon had big ideas for online retailing in Australia and signed a memorandum of understanding with the German outfit about selling their products here.
When I saw the deal she had struck, I reckoned that the Germans had definitely got the better end of it. In return for their 30 per cent interest in Sharon Austen Ltd, they advised Sharon about what products were selling well around the world and they also gave her the rights to their German film library. There were many things wrong with this arrangement, but this was about selling sex on the internet in 2000—how could anything go wrong? Around the world, other websites were already beginning to charge millions of customers a $30-a-month fee to access galleries of thumbnailed porn and the odd vibrator or cock ring.
Within weeks of her return from Germany, Sharon offered me the job as her Chief Operations Officer. It was a big decision and would involve leaving Canberra (and Eros) to live in Sydney. I talked it over with Robbie, who was supportive, and after a couple of days I decided to jump. It would mean finding a new CEO for Eros, a position Robbie did not want. During the phone-sex debates in the Senate, I had got to know one of then-Democrats leader Senator Meg Lees’ advisors, John Davey. He had shown interest in the job if it ever became available. He was an openly gay man with a keen political nose and he was a rakish barrister by trade. When he jumped at the opportunity, I packed up a few things and moved to Sydney.
* * * *
Robbie was not coming with me. Our relationship was maturing well and I knew we would be on the phone every day, so there was no separation anxiety from either of us. We both worked for causes, not for money or an overly comfortable lifestyle, and if that meant we lived apart for a while, that was just part of the plan.
From the beginning, we had had an agreement about how we would deal with other sexual relationships. Not ending ours was the first rule. I felt like I had to formalise something with him after he had told me about a disastrous previous relationship. With two young children, his primary relationship had hopelessly broken down and he had then entered into a clandestine relationship with his partner’s younger sister. It ended rather tragically when she was killed in a car accident and was later the subject of a novel called Soaring by Ross Fitzgerald. I was angry with him when I heard about it, even though it happened years before we had met. I wanted us to be clear about what the protocols were if and when either of us felt sexually attracted to other people.
So within the first few years of our relationship we had agreed that as long as we were open and honest about our relationships there would be no room for jealousy, envy, emotional hurt or other bad stuff to happen. I wouldn’t call it an ‘open marriage’ because we had no intention of marrying anyone, least of all each other, but it was an ‘open relationship’ in that we never closed the doors to anything or anyone. It’s a funny thing, but when you trust someone enough to go off and have sex with other people something happens within that arrangement that takes the relationship to a different level.
I’ve often advised it to friends having relationship problems. Poly-amorous couples reject the notion that exclusivity is the key to ongoing and abiding love. Our polyamorous relationship has, over the years, seen us occasionally tumbling into bed with other women in threesomes (once with a good lesbian friend of mine). It has allowed me to occasionally spend the night out with other men and arrive home at 4 a.m. to snuggle back into bed with Robbie and it has allowed him to see a couple of girlfriends from time to time—even one he had been in a relationship with before he met me. As long as everyone was aware of the situation, it worked well enough, and much better than if we had tried to schlep around the boundaries of a conventional relationship.
* * * *
In Sydney’s Darlinghurst I found a beautiful, small art deco unit at the top of Liverpool Street in a building called ‘Mont Clair’. The unit had original parquetry floors and a fish head spout in the bath. Later, I discovered a brilliant rooftop terrace where I could watch the nightly exodus of large fruit bats heading out from Centennial Park to the Botanical Gardens. The building was on a company title and the board had to approve new tenants. This involved an interview with the chairperson and a detailed application form. It was all very old-fashioned, and since I did not see my background in the adult industry as being an asset I started rebuilding my past and finding friends as referees who would say the right things. Unfortunately, when I discovered the identity of the chair, I assumed this wasn’t going to wash. He worked in the NSW attorney-general’s department and we had been trading volleys over the failure of NSW classifications laws for a couple of years. We had never met, but his letters were generally pretty stuffy and mostly dismissive of my views. In the end he was kinder than I thought he would be—we got on just fine. And I got the apartment.
The offices of Sharon Austen Ltd were only ten minutes’ walk from my unit, in a converted terrace house in Stanley Street. To get there, I would go past at least half-a-dozen street workers each morning at the top end of Palmer Street. Further down that street was a building that was once Tilly Devine’s famous brothel and would feature on Channel 9’s crime series Underbelly: Razor a decade later. I was feeling right at home. I had spent a lot of time in the area in my Eros job, where Friday lunches on Riley Street outside the large adult wholesale company Calvista had become an institution.
As COO, my job was to ensure the company’s compliance with state, federal and international legislation. This included providing advice on planning issues for future adult retail outlets and the preparation of government submissions and applications. It was also my job to oversee the establishment of the website and the selection and sourcing of products.
A new personal relationship was the furthest thing from my mind, and yet amid this dynamic workload it happened.
* * * *
Back in the early 1980s, I couldn’t get enough of Elvis Costello. I just loved his crazy fusion of rock, punk and country and I still do. When he announced that his 1982 Australian tour would include a gig at the ANU bar, I was there. I was also keen on Sydney and Newcastle pub bands as many of them made it down to Canberra. My favourite was Pel Mel. Their first single in 1981, ‘No Word From China’, was played everywhere and they even performed it on Countdown. When it was announced that they would be the backing band for Elvis Costello’s 1982 tour, I was over the moon.
Twenty years on and a few weeks into my new job at SharonAusten.com, I noticed a tall, good-looking man with greying wavy hair standing at the bottom of the office stairs staring up at me. We made a couple of jokes and he then introduced himself as Sharon’s brother, Graeme Dunne. He had been Pel Mel’s lead guitarist and vocalist. He certainly didn’t recognise the skinny banshee from the fourth row of that Canberra concert, and, likewise, I didn’t recognise him. But, as corny as it sounds, there was an immediate spark. Not a sexual one, though. I wasn’t looking for that. I had just got back from a two week buying trip to the US where I had had a short relationship with a Broadway musical composer. Robbie was okay with it and although the relationship was nothing special, the composer and I were still corresponding. Back home, I was casually seeing a couple of other people, including a Sydney muso, so my sexual dance card was full.
Graeme worked for Sharon’s stockbroking partner and had dropped in after work for a few drinks. We started to see a bit of each other via the after-work drinks ritual on the terrace and ended up going out for dinner a few times. Then, by a strange twist of fate, we just happened to travel overseas on the same flight, although I was in business class and off to meet his sister in New York, while he was off to Chicago to try and reignite an old dalliance. We met at Sydney airport and then again in Bangkok where we drank champagne together.
When we both got back to Australia we hung out a bit and started having very casual and very drunken sex. I went back to New York to work for a while which meant we didn’t see much of each other, but arriving back in Australia in September of 2001, I found myself at the Penthouse Pet awards party at the Pure Platinum nightclub one night. It just happened to be the 11th. All of a sudden the glamour of the night started receding as the images of the Twin Towers on the little telly in the corner of the bar slowly overwhelmed the party. I tried to call my new friends in New York but couldn’t get through to anyone. I felt like I needed to be with someone in a quiet space to digest what was happening. Robbie was watching it in Canberra with his eldest daughter and Graeme felt like the right person to call so I went over to his place to watch it all unfold.
That was the beginning. I guess you would say it was a relationship that was hatched while 9/11 played out. Graeme liked many of the things I liked: the beach, socialising, partying, shopping. I liked his friends, and although I could see that underneath his avuncular exterior he could be very dark and moody, I gradually fell in love with him.
* * * *
Graeme had a small unit in an older-style building in Darling Point in Sydney’s east. It had a great garden and a pool where we had lots of parties. A two-bedroom apartment came up for rent not long after that and we decided to move in together.
Robbie came and stayed on a semi-regular basis, but would often bring a girlfriend when he came and the four of us would go out to dinner. We would retire to adjacent bedrooms for the night but we never had sex as a group. I think I was happier to be with Graeme on my own at this time. Graeme and I had a few moments, but generally it was a happy time there, with occasional camping holidays and trips to Samoa and Nicaragua. During that period, Sharon Austen Ltd merged with another adult company, Gallery Global Networks, whose owners I knew well. I took on a new role and Graeme became less and less interested in stockbroking. Towards the end of 2002, the lack of ‘cause’ in the corporate world was starting to mess with my head. Robbie was running Eros again in Canberra after John Davey’s term as CEO had expired. But because I still wanted to live in Sydney, I started consulting to Eros through our Body Politics company.
At the same time, copyright and porn piracy was starting to become a big issue in the industry. Referring to porn as ‘intellectual property’ was a bit of an oxymoron for many people. For those that paid up to $5000 for the rights to duplicate a porn film in Australia, on the other hand, it was no small matter when they saw up to 30 of their new titles appearing in a rival catalogue. The Greek ‘Mafia’ were the main offenders, even though most of them lived on the canals up on the Gold Coast, and many were part of extended families with brothers, cousins and parents listed as company executives.
While most smaller X-rated retailers thought it was just something they would have to live with, the major wholesalers and retailers like Adultshop.com, Calvista and Gallery Global Networks (previously SharonAusten.com) decided to fight back by setting up their own copyright protection agency, the Adult Industry Copyright Organisation (AICO). Graeme left stockbroking to take on the job of running the new organisation and I went on to the board.
Over the next few years, AICO prosecuted a range of illegal operators in the civil courts and won over a million dollars in damages. But it was a losing game with the police unable to keep up with the movements of the pirates.
Meanwhile, a couple of years into the relationship, Graeme came down with a bad case of pancreatitis and had to be hospitalised for six weeks. We were both beginning to get on each other’s nerves. Living and working together was becoming just too intense and I was feeling like I didn’t really want to be in a relationship with anyone. So before he came out of hospital I packed up my things and fled to an apartment on my own in Woolloomooloo. It wasn’t officially a breakup, but in my own apartment I was the gatekeeper again and I issued keys to both Graeme and Robbie. This way I was nobody’s baby, but it did mean that I now had two men in my bed.
Initially, I had reservations about how it would work, but they quickly faded as we just got on with it. If we all went to a party, Graeme and I would tend to stay all night while Robbie would quietly slip out the back door after an hour or two and we’d all meet up at home later. Robbie and Graeme were not attracted to each other but were nonetheless at home with each other’s nudity around me. There was never any jealousy or sexual lobbying, and every encounter together was like the first time. Sometimes Robbie or Graeme just wanted their own space and I would sleep with one or the other in separate rooms, but just as often we would all pile into the one bed.
None of my friends had lived as a threesome so there were no guides out there to chat about the dynamics of it all, and it was hardly the sort of thing you’d ask your parents about. Strangely enough, though, both Robbie’s parents and mine were fine with it. We would often arrive together for family BBQs and birthdays, and even though cousins and friends knew we were living as three nobody treated us any differently. We probably lived this way for another few years on and off but in the end, Graeme moved back to his hometown of Newcastle when his mother died and ended up marrying and having his own family. We are all still good friends.
Because Robbie’s and my relationship had never stopped, there was never a feeling of having to get used to being a ‘couple’ again, even though we were still living in different cities. The only difference being that my bed felt like it was my own again. I would recommend a dose of polyamory to anyone who is curious about it.