Sexual and ethnic identity at heart of Peter Polites novel

Peter Polites’s impressive debut novel mines the struggles of ethnic and sexual identity in Australia.

Down the Hume by Peter Polites.

Peter Polites’s impressive debut novel Down the Hume charts similar terrain to Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded. It further mines the struggles of ethnic and sexual identity in modern Australia, only this time the protagonist is on a far more precarious path, headed for self-destruction.

The story centres on Bux, a second-generation Greek man living in western Sydney. He is struggling to maintain an abusive gay relationship alongside his spiralling drug addiction.

Polites, who is of Greek descent, is an associate director of the activist writing collective Sweatshop. He uses this novel to probe the conflicting intersections between ethnic and gay identity from someone both literally and figuratively living on the margins of representation.

Each chapter is titled after a road snaking through the western suburbs of Sydney, the ­author’s home ground. Polites utilises the street names to frame and locate Bux’s life story as he draws out the struggles of growing up gay and Greek. We learn of Bux’s contempt for his abusive father, the demoralising teen years spent playing it straight and the ongoing challenges trying to reconcile his sexuality with his family’s vision of Greek manhood.

Bux’s memories interplay with details of his dependency on prescription painkillers and his injurious relationship with a man named Nice Arms Pete.

Pete is a gym-obsessed, petty drug dealer whom Bux struggles to trust, or to break free from. As Bux’s reliance on a sexual companion — and a regular drug supplier — intensifies, so too does his fragile emotional world begin to fall apart. Drug binges, bad sex and violent episodes with Pete become all too much the norm.

Bux works as an orderly at a local nursing home, where there is some bittersweet payoff for all his menial work: the constant availability of the pills he so desires, and unexpectedly gratifying moments with the residents, some of whom offer the kind of kinship unavailable elsewhere.

One in particular is Bruno, an elderly Italian man suffering from Alzheimer’s, who regularly tells Bux about a special “friendship” he had with a local man when he first arrived in Australia. Bruno’s retelling of this gay relationship acts as an apt parallel to Bux’s own, demonstrating how unhealthy and harmful Bux’s relationship with Pete is, despite it being an open one.

Bux’s mother helps fill some of the void. His bond with her is built around a mutual contempt for Bux’s father and the oppression inflicted by the men in their life. It is also expressed in unusual but heartening ways, including her interpreting his drug-induced dreams for him and even watching whale videos together on YouTube. “Me and my mama. More in common than I thought … Both of us have vanishing men and substances to lean on.”

But as Bux’s drug habit sees him down more and more pills, his life begins to unravel. He spends hours in bed poring over online porn, and even stalking Pete at the gym, as he suspects him of cheating on him. Soon these actions coalesce into a final terrible binge.

This novel explores changing ethnic identity in outer suburban communities. When Bux goes in search of Pete, he buys an aba — a traditional garment worn by men in the Middle East — to try to blend in with the other men. What proves so unexpected is how Bux is accepted and welcomed by the local Arab men, even as a Greek gay man stalking his boyfriend. Bux realises not only how entrenched he is with other ethnic communities of western Sydney, but also how much he identifies with them.

Down the Hume is a robust study of ethnic, class and sexual identities in contemporary Australia. Bux feels discomfort over his gayness and Greekness, anger towards the increasing gentrification of Sydney and a disconnect with the broader gay community.

Moreover, Polites offers a refreshing look into the depths of addiction many gay men experience, one often fuelled by intense self-doubt and compounded by a larger culture encouraging instant sex, self-medication and transactional sexual relationships. Down the Hume is an examination of the displacement experienced by those living on a city’s fringes, lost in their own rapidly changing urban landscapes.

Nathan Smith is an arts writer based in Melbourne.

Down the Hume

By Peter Polites

Hachette, 352pp, $27.99