![]() ![]() Then came the eighties, AIDS, and our lives became all about death.ĭying seemed inevitable. Because after a millennia of haters wishing and visiting death on queers, we at last felt born to be alive. ![]() The Rocky Horror Picture Show, David Bowie, disco, Amanda Lear, Sylvester… Our people were everywhere in popular culture and the future seemed bright. Remembering the joy and optimism of the ‘gay scene’ of the late seventies still makes me smile. I was born the same year as Timothy Conigrave. ![]() ![]() After the sexual revolution of the sixties, the seventies seemed to herald an openness to queer issues and a trajectory towards gay law reform. It was the end of the seventies, a decade that promised so much to queer people. In his late teens, Timothy Conigrave began his relationship with John Caleo, the captain of the football team at Melbourne’s Xavier College which they both attended. That tragedy is, of course, front and centre in Timothy Conigrave’s Holding the Man. I recall now how strongly that ode of remembrance for the fallen of World War I resonated during the eighties and nineties as AIDS decimated entire generations of gay men. As I look back over Timothy Conigrave’s life, Laurence Binyon’s famous lines echo through my head. ![]()
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