When Townsville was Fabulous: Based on Tittle-Tattle by Robert John Burton Sometimes, you get an okay dance; you meet friends, drink and look at the walking talent. Sometimes, you get plain dull in ugly night. Sometimes, you get lucky and find this night fabulous, maybe this night you meet a man of interest. Suddenly, in my face was my man of interest, the drop-dead gorgeous red-haired Scorcher who organised dances for the local AIDS Council; amazing how folk will leap to help the beautiful, and Scorcher was beautiful. Dances held at the Stockman’s Bar in the Townsville Show-grounds during the early 1990s gave our queer community a respite from heterosoc because during this age of AIDS we were an easy target for violence. The bar was a brown-brick, single-story building frocked in spiky foliage, protected and safe, with an enclosed beer garden next to the racetrack that allowed patrons to be loud as the best torch songs and dance anthems demanded; a howl of a building that loved attention. Old dykes, tough, business-like as old saddles and resembling such ran the place. Whether they had any fun doing so would remain their secret. Dancing for queers is a serious business and requires a particular environment: the place must be dark, lights directed to mirror balls, smoking almost compulsory and sleaziness assumed. This darkness should continue outside allowing a cloak of invisibility—if you didn’t know where to go then neither did the more violent aspects of heterosoc. Beautiful people flashing flesh and glamorous attire gyrated, posed, kissed and more with no gaze or heterosoc privilege. Love reinvented, dissolved into something whole. A place where our community showed the best face. I wore skin-tight black pants because I could, and a leopard skin print silk shirt ready to pounce.
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‘Dance with me, Arty?’ Scorcher smiled and I was liberated, I was doing the dance-fandango with the hottest boy in the room and all that suspicion that heterosoc was stupid and bad things were happening to good people did not matter for now. I was going to eat this guy and be young and beautiful forever. Here on the dance floor, we did not have to be resentful of power that could dispossess even our own bodies, as happened in AIDS wards everywhere. Here we rejected the labels: even if you were HIV positive someone would love you. Appearing in spangles of sequins were, oh Mary, Drag Queens. This one was called Ruby. Ruby, dripping with sequins, demanded attention. Scorcher’s smug grin was shadowed. At this I even managed to laugh. ‘Tell me how beautiful I am; look how this fabric clings to me,’ Ruby cooed, fluttering a giant feathered fan of red and silver. In a strange deranged way Ruby was, but the affected voice and exaggerated eye-makeup interfered with the image. Or helped depending on your point of view, and alcohol consumption. Everyone was and is beautiful in the dark. I thought of the slogan: We’re here, we’re Queer, get used to it. ‘Hello Arty, how’ve you been?’ he breathed, and I rolled up my lips and gushed in detail my encounter with Scorcher—after all I was in the presence of royalty. A space rippled outwards as other dancers gave grace. My buddy Blue came up later and stuck his tongue out for me to admire his black Kaposi’s Sarcomas—his death slugs—that covered his tongue and inside of his lips; on his death bed sometime later, blind and resigned, he still stuck his tongue out for me because he could hardly move any other part of his emaciated body. Death seen this way was shattering and made me want to counter the horrible fearful campaigns of the homophobic. To be queer was never respectable, especially for gay males. Westernised countries reported huge numbers of deceased from HIV/AIDS; unprotected sex created the perfect murder-suicide pact. Safe sex was the new paradigm. To identify as queer in a regional area opened up attacks on vulnerable people from 2
a hostile public and media because queers are grouped as different to the heterosexual ideology. Research from the local AIDS Council suggested that Townsville had a sizable queer population with a hidden history which needed a public face to encourage safe sex practices and HIV testing. Too many young men were dying because they were lovers who loved freely. No nightmare could be as horrific as living. My generation became infected through lack of knowledge, but without action the next will become infected through lack of information. Not surprisingly, desperate and disparate types started emerging from the suburbs to organise themselves into a social group to educate heterosoc. Political activity spun out from young things at James Cook University and the local AIDS Council to form GALRIN, the Gay and Lesbian Resource Information Network. We decided to facilitate social and cultural events to run concurrently with the Townsville Pacific Festival. At an uncomfortable inaugural meeting, our mutual ability to annoy each other while organising events contributed immeasurably to the general air of urgency that unless we worked quickly, all the goodwill would be lost. This bitchy scene with sneering queens and disgruntled lesbians was the reflection of society’s loathing that we absorbed and was not helped by the uncomfortable windowless cubicle—part of the AIDS Council office in the old Stanley Street clock-tower—enclosing us like too many big fish in a glass bowl. ‘As president I expect unanimous support, or I will resign!’ spat Pim. Unsettled, the small abused committee would at any other time have tested his bluff. For now, their attitude reflected the threats without. Some office bearers in GALRIN were HIV positive, so their desire to see acceptance rather than some insulting tolerance of queers became a badge of dignity as they suffered their night sweats, panic attacks, and grief for lives lived too short. ‘Think I have AIDS,’ divulged Pim and I felt for the silly prick. More would follow. Party boy sold his home and prepared for dying. Funerals were 3
regular. Others purposely got HIV—the new wonder status—and I went mad from then because how can you be happy when the time past is so rotten? ‘You’re so arty,’ posed Diva. I blinked, and was volunteered unanimously to curate the Outproud Art Exhibition, which if successful assured that I would be pissed-on ever more; no-one could be queer and celebrated. Community engagement kept the issues of law reform and other aims alive in many places; we were what we were—kill us, feed us to the cannibals, fence us up, make us hide—come what may, our self-realisation demanded a public face. GALRIN was going to change Townsville-homophobe-central with common attitudes of mutual distrust, and best-pretentious-twerp-foot-forward; the new modern nature of queerness and visibility was our best weapon to fight the misunderstandings surrounding AIDS. Meonly was the festival’s music coordinator for Night Music, an event held after Outproud. She was a real male hater. Contact with her was painful as she delighted in humiliation; a phone conversation was a test in civility. When I heard her voice on the end of the phone, I tasted bile. ‘Helloooo I have some helpers for the exhibition. There is so-and-so from the Burdekin, phone number blah, blAH, BLAH an’ CRUISER OVER AT...’ ‘Just a moment, let me grab a pen.’ ‘WHAT! Oh for Sappho’s sake don’t you want these contacts…tut…tut...tut?’ Her attitude sucking in air from my end. ‘Hey it’s okay, let me get organised, I have a wall phone here, and bythe-way, hello Meonly.’ ‘Whateverrrrr.’ Something about sows passed my mind, as did the sinking feeling that little could come out of this. Regardless and relentlessly on my part, I convinced a State Gallery Trustee to open Outproud on August 20, 1994 at 412 Flinders 4
Mall—presently Mary Who? Bookshop—and filled the empty building with enough dyke and poofter art to startle any nervous nellies who entered at their own risk.Setting up the shebang, I got excited, you got excited, we all got excited as a queer-queer mixture of the dedicated banged down thousands of carpet nails and organised spaces ready to hang artworks. Once a bank branch complete with a jumbo safe, rented to us by the Townsville Pacific Festival, the building had good lighting, a kitchen, public loos, a warren of spacious rooms— a tatty TARDIS on a Stonewall mission. I curated a conversation about Queerness, how every day and ordinary it all was, a mirror of our existence. On show for sale were about 150 artworks, not so much incendiary as come here kitty-kitty, although a couple of male-bum drawings did upset a pair of silly Christians who had apparently never seen an image of Michelangelo’s David. The local drag queen court reprimanded me for cataloguing their display of over-the-top frocks as dresses, oh Mary! My short-lived fling with Scorcher burned intensely as the blaze his wonderful coiffure represented. He was hot and I was not. I scrubbed up well, he was a natural beauty. I sacrificed to causes, Scorcher lived to party. In all wars some people party. An age difference did not help. Heterosoc offered us born-again-Christians pleading for our souls; plaintive letters-to-the-editor saw recriminations about visible gays, always finding ugly meanings in beautiful things. With hurt expressions they would march into the exhibition venue demanding we remove those disgusting nude drawings now! More bizarre were their explanations of how I failed to mindread their good intentions, after-all did I not realise they were reformed lesbians? Which apparently granted them the right to judge others? I told them to come back when they had released their inner dykes. I used my best pooftervoice, informing them we had the backing of the Townsville City Council and police support and returned fire.
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‘Excuuuuuse me! Are you wishing that homosexuals would remain invisible? Or that there was no information or news about AIDS? Neither attitude is real. Your narrow and suspect views of sexuality are killing a generation of people because you cannot handle your fear.’ I stood firm—the ghosts of millions of AIDS related deaths and injustices by organised religion gave me solid ground. Queers must tell their stories, even if they are not pretty. Our lives are richer because of our experiences, which is sorrow’s paradoxical gift. Buddies remembered, friendships lost, listening for names at the AIDS memorial services, all those transient friends who had become a source of hope for all the misfits, because they were us and we were them. What was all the hate and spite for? Heterosoc singled us out then resented our specialness and the queer community had no cure for old scars. No-one considers the lost legacy that might make for a better future when they are bitching for some little power play; loneliness is no reward. After the Pacific Festival burnout and with the announcement in late 1994 that the retrovirus cocktail was having positive effects, GALRIN became entropic and fell into the cracks of history. Townsville was not fabulous anymore. Queers went back to the suburbs where they have always lived, or got on the first flight out to more fabulous scenes, a slow drip-drip-dripping away from an organised scene. These days, few people remember me as a younger man so my past is never really past, it stays with me all the time as there is no support group to age with. As a result, I have become rather prickly socially and react to others’ sense that all is supposedly well and fair because we who have survived HIV/AIDS have learned to live in and understand loss. My skin sits uncomfortably on me now. I am a little prickly.
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