‘Boys come in all shapes and sizes’: Robert Dessaix on the nuances of masculinity and sexuality
One Christmas, Robert Dessaix asked for the gift of a doll in a dress. Was he queer, gender fluid, or gender dysphoric? In a modern world that loves its labels he writes: ‘I was just a boy playing with a doll. Masculinity is infinitely nuanced’.
We were barely home from our honeymoon, shopping at our local grocery one morning, when it struck me like a smackeroo blurdy right out of the blue: splat! For the next 40 to 80 years – it’s hard to be precise about these things – I was now doomed to being good. We both were.
I married Lisa, I think (but could be deluded), because I was love-struck. At root, though, before love gets a chance to swoop on you like a kingfisher, there’s the growing desire to escape from home. Thank you, it’s been special, but it’s time to get out. One obvious way to get out respectably – indeed, to a round of scattered applause – was to get married, at least in my day, escaping your parents’ too colourfully painted, wall-to-wall carpeted, tragically furnished (in futile hope, you see, of happiness) suburban family life. And so we got married. Everyone did.
“Why did you get married? Didn’t you know?” people ask from time to time – still, to this day. Know what, exactly? Come on, what? Of course I got married. And I don’t regret it, not for an instant. Life’s a caravanserai, as I have learnt, with many chambers and secret corners, alive with travellers as well as gadabouts; it’s not a chapel. Lisa might regret it, though. I haven’t asked lately. When we eventually parted ways, she thanked me for what I’d taught her and waved goodbye. At the time I was devastated, naturally. It was the first time in my life that I had failed for all to see.
As soon as we’d been able, we’d built a house in one of those grey-green-grassed Canberra suburbs with a painterly view to the mountains in the west. We designed it ourselves, so, needless to say, it was a modernistic fantasy with an island bench, a sunken bath, two courtyards (a hint of Araby) and Marimekko touches everywhere. Clean lines, secluded, but at the same time open to the light. A prison, but with big windows.
When it struck me that day in the supermarket that I now had to be good forever (we were dawdling with our trolley in Spices & Condiments, browsing picturesquely with my southeast Asian cookery course in mind), I remember looking across at my wife and thinking: This is it. I didn’t mean spices or herbs or rices for my cooking course, I meant being a nice couple, I meant plodding contentedly side-by-side through life, being good, whether happy or not, forever – or at any rate until one of us keeled over. The sun went out. I felt suddenly sick. I was appalled. And this was just a few weeks in. Why had nobody warned me?
One Christmas, asked what I’d like, I said a doll. It must have been in the early ’50s. Not a gender-neutral doll or an anatomically correct boy doll called Brad, but a doll in a dress. Not as an act of defiance, either, I wasn’t poking my tongue out at the patriarchy or anything, since I didn’t know there was one, all I wanted was a girl doll to dote on. Did I want to play mother? Hardly. Did I deep down want a sister? Not as far as I know.
Usually I got a paperback book for Christmas (The Colditz Story, Seven Years in Tibet, something gripping and improving) or socks or … what did I get all those years ago? Once, I remember, I got a cowboy suit with tassels on the jacket. My mother had made it, sewing away secretly on the Singer after I went to bed. Seventy years later, on the street where I now live, a little boy would still be unlikely to show off his new doll. However, it would not raise eyebrows as a new cowboy suit might – the gunslinging, the massacring of native peoples, the cocky maleness would all give unpardonable offence. Nowadays on Christmas mornings, the little boys here on St Georges Terrace in Hobart, sporting cool new earbuds they’ve just ripped out of their wrapping, zoom about on newfangled bicycles, as do their sisters.
Our adoptive parents Tom and Jean must have talked about what the best thing to do might be, but in the event I did get the doll, with dresses, blouses and jackets to fit (no undergarments) in sky-blue tones. I was enchanted. She didn’t cry, wind up or wee, but her eyelids went up and down – I do remember that. Later, Jean made her a few extra outfits on the Singer. With just the blowflies to observe me, I tried them on one day on the veranda, a pair of drooping underpants on my head to give me a Dorothy Lamour look (so luxuriant, that ’50s style). The man next door was “scathing”, apparently, when he caught sight of me across the fence, but tiffs were common in those days when the street was a village. I didn’t feel abashed.
Nicely observed mon ami, but who wants to know any of this?, Niall WhatsApped me from Siem Reap in Cambodia late one morning when I mentioned that this childhood memory would be figuring in my tale. He’d heard it before. We’d known each other for decades so he’d heard almost everything before. At heart Niall is an Enlightenment man. Men who knit or powdered boys in kimonos are just another sideshow to him. Bearded ladies, boys with dolls – it was all the same to Niall.
But it wasn’t to me. I drew a deep breath and wrote: I’m writing it down because I’d like to make it clear from the start: I’m not a cross-dresser. The doll, the underpants thing, I am not cross-dressing. Silence, so I added: Nor was I a queer little boy, or a fluid little boy, or a little boy who wished he’d been born a little girl or was living in a body of the wrong sex. Not for a nanosecond. I was just a boy playing with a doll.
Right. With underpants on his head. No need to stamp your foot, Niall calmly messaged back.
Nor do I feel I’m a member of any sexual community, I continued (I was seizing the moment). Pause. Then: As such.
Silence in Siem Reap, where the sun must have been barely up. Was my message getting through? Then he replied gnomically: You know what they’ll say, don’t you.
All I want to establish here is that, while I may not be the spitting image of Gary Cooper, I happen to have no sense at all of a womanly presence inside me. Many men do, I gather, perhaps millions do worldwide, even tens of millions from Bandung to Baffin Island, but I don’t. Nor am I much interested, to be candid, just as I’m uninterested in science fiction and Bulgarian throat-singing – I’m not opposed to either, but neither raises a flicker of interest. I have no awareness of being on any spectrum, either: on the contrary, I am a node in an infinite web, always sparking, not a point in a gamut. Sometimes, when I’m feeling panoptic, I’m a shard in a vast mosaic. So, from my point of view, on our back veranda all those years ago, I was just a boy playing with a doll, trying to look like Dorothy Lamour while I fussed. Boys come in all shapes and sizes, and masculinity is infinitely nuanced – particularly in Siem Reap, in my experience, where it could be the heat, but that’s another matter.
Next morning I gave Niall a quick serve. He got up early to beat the heat when he was in the tropics. Even now I am not queer or sexually fluid: I’m just a man. Completely.
Pause. Niall: Queer probably covers it, then.
He knew that would annoy me. Me: Give me a break. No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t cover what I feel I am at all. I’m a homosexual, Niall, gay if you like but not queer. I’m a man who likes men. That’s it.
For you, young Thomas Robert (I’d say if I could really talk to my younger self), “queer” meant “off-colour” (“I’ve come over all queer”), while at the same time serving as a term of abuse, a threat, the sort of thing louts might sneer at you before smashing their fist into your face or kicking you in the kidneys. “F..king queer,” they’d grunt and sink the boot in. Not now so much. These days “queer” has had its fangs pulled out, it has academic echoes and agreeably inclusive overtones, and you have to say “faggot” if you want to be offensive. “Queer” just means eccentric in one’s sexual tastes now, with a bit of crossover behaviour – a cowboy in high heels, stocky women with girlfriends, drag queens, Mardi Gras presenters from SBS, David Bowie in a certain mood and so on. None of that is objectionable, but it doesn’t begin to describe how I feel.
If “queer” won’t do the job, what will? “Gay”? It has international currency, I suppose, everyone is using it. “Mum, there’s something I want to tell you: I’m gay.” “Bu, ada yang ingin saya sampaikan: saya gay.” “Mamó, tengo algo que decirte: soy gay.” And so on.
If “gay” is too fuzzy, should we throw caution to the winds and say “effete”? Let’s be frank, a bit effete is probably right in my case, a tiny bit Dirk Bogarde. Too mannered? Too much of a performer? Too “sensitive” was Jean’s expression. She warned me against being too sensitive as soon as I could walk. It wasn’t wrong, she said, it made life hum, but the price you paid for it was too high. Possibly. Yet I am a man for all that. Completely.
Sometimes, particularly in Western countries, countries with a Christian background, finding illuminating words to describe our sexual feelings in public without hurting someone else’s feelings can be a challenge. You would be disappointed, I think, Thomas Robert, especially after your experience in the Soviet Union in your mid-twenties. Remember how, stiff with anxiety, we tiptoed in those days through the minefield of forbidden expressions and thoughts? How it was obligatory to mouth a piety or two before you spoke in front of others during classes, to voice certain mantras and watchwords before getting to your point at a seminar, for instance (“in the immortal words of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin…”). You can probably still smell the petrol fumes, the men’s tobacco- laden breath, the all-pervading damp in the corridors, can’t you – how they gnaw into your brain, those Soviet odours – but can you remember the daily litany of socialist pieties in the newspapers we read in the metro, in the lectures in the classrooms, in the concert programs, on the radio, in the posters in the street? Even the wording on matchboxes was censored. You’d be astounded how heavily policed our public utterances are today, 60 years later, in the West. As I remember, you hoped for something better.
When I wrote A Mother’s Disgrace all those years ago, finally moving beyond your world of Russian verb endings and academic blather that nobody had ever asked for or would ever read, my immediate ambition was to jump over a chasm that had yawned all of a sudden at my feet and land safely on the other side. As I approached 50, when you’re supposed to sit back and throw in the towel, chasms started opening up around me, one after the other, bringing me up short. In my mid-40s, when I finally met our birth mother, Yvonne, whom you pictured but never met, there was a real affection between us, but – let’s be honest – neither she nor I quite approved of the other. Blood does not mean love.
And so these fissures gaped in front of me and had to be vaulted over with a book. (What else?) It was more of an abyss than a fissure that yawned when my HIV was diagnosed – a death sentence in those macabre early days – and so I wrote another book, finding yet more words to launch me across the pit. (I avoided the term HIV, however – there’s no reference to HIV or AIDS in the book at all, it’s not a book about a disease any more than Bonnard’s Almond Tree in Flower is about an almond tree in flower.) And then … but you get the picture, I’m sure. Each book was a leap, a kind of upswing. At one point there was a heart attack, so up I leapt again, crossing to safety on a book; then old age crept up on me, with its endless maintenance rituals, its boniness, its pilates, its slow shrivelling and closing in, and up I shot again and went to Java and wrote another book.
These books, you see, were not about adoption, or being gay, or HIV, or cardiac health, or how to age and still look like Jane Fonda. Instead, each book was an attempt to redeem nothingness, from my perspective, or at least absurdity, something that religious observance does for most people. In a word, each book was about art. Here I sit (as it were) in my twilit cul-de-sac – no longer on the highway, as I’m well aware, no longer cantering gaily along some boulevard, waving at friendly faces – here I sit in my dead end, weaving not stories (I don’t do stories) but monologues and sometimes dialogues about what makes life good.
Edited extract from Chameleon: A Memoir of Art, Travel, Ideas And Love by Robert Dessaix (Text Publishing), out on March 4
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