For the Uncle I Never Knew – It’s Time!

I had an interesting talk with my Dad the other weekend when he came out to visit. It was the eve of the Gay Marriage march in Sydney & I was writing a blog post about his older brother Johnny.

Being the journo & editor that I am, I had to make sure I had my facts right before publishing the post – it’s one about a family member & I know that some of my family read this blog, so don’t want to piss any of them off or write something that’s untrue.

Turns out what I knew wasn’t entirely correct. The little I did know about him mostly came from memories of what my Mum told me when I was a kid. So whether it’s my memory that’s changed things or Mum’s, I don’t know, but it’s sure interesting the way we remember things and create our family stories and identities.

I’ve held off on publishing this post, cause what I had to say is really important to me, and Johnny’s story is central to it, but I don’t want to publish untruths, so I’ve let it marinate for a while.

What I’ve realised is that there are many truths in family histories, and it’s all a matter of perspective and time. The thing with Uncle Johnny’s story is that there are so many unknowns, I think a lot of people have tried to fill in the gaps to make it whole and ease the pain a bit. I don’t know for sure though.

Anyway, I’ve decided to publish the original post below and then add a little more to it at the end.

Original post:

My Dad is almost the middle child in his family, almost because there were seven of them, and Dad is child number four.

He was born in 1954, in Mt Isa, the heart of outback Queensland, and lived in and around there until he was about 10 years old.

This is mining country. And back then, it was one of the toughest parts of the country around. Probably still is, but mining back then was for the hardest of the hard bastards. No OH&S, stress leave or air conditioning – just hard bloody work & even harder drinking.

From the stories my Dad told us, he grew up in a time of complete freedom – no seatbelts, wagging school, riding your push bike everywhere, leaving the house at morning & not coming home until dinner time, going to the shops & buying ciggies for your mum. Wild tales of a childhood that seemed so fun and free, compared to my own 80s childhood filled with ‘Ban the Fag’ & AIDS ads, stranger danger &  yes, seatbelts!

It wasn’t until I learned about his older brother, Johnny, that I knew the times he grew up in were just as rigid and stifling as the 80s were becoming, if not more so.

My Uncle Johnny was what my Dad has always described as being “effeminate”. My mum’s translation – gay. Not something which went down too well in a bullshit macho part of the world like the middle of Queensland, especially in the 60s.

 

Johnny wanted to be a dancer.

 

Apart from the dog in this picture:

 

nothing expresses the sheer joy of being alive more than dancing.

And that’s what my Uncle Johnny wanted to do with his life. Unfortunately, my Grandfather and society had other ideas.

When he was 21, my Uncle Johnny was sent off droving with a group of men. All seasoned drovers, probably born on a drover’s track. It was my Grandfather’s way for Johnny, to learn to be a man, to harden up, to stop being “effeminate”, to stop wanting to dance.

Can you imagine anything more foreign and terrifying to someone who wanted to be a professional dancer, than to be forced into the isloating and endless world of a drover?

No luxuries back then, just swags, a caravan if you were lucky, tinned food, billy tea, dust, flies, sweat, livestock, the stars, the meanest motherfucking insects and wildlife on the planet, and other drovers.

Uncle Johnny didn’t last long in that harsh and unforgiving world.

 

He hung himself from a tree with his own belt after a few weeks.

 

He didn’t leave a note.

There’s been all kind of speculation in my Dad’s family about why Johnny killed himself. How could he be so selfish? How could he do something like that and not leave behind a reason? Was he abused by the other drovers and couldn’t take it?

I know in my heart that the reason Uncle Johnny killed himself was because he was living in a world that could not bear to accept him for who he truly was. A man different to all other men around him, who threatened their sense of self, whose existence questioned their masculinity and way of being. A man who found the pain of trying to be something that he was not unbearable. A man broken through loneliness and who could no longer find the joy in living.

A man who couldn’t dance anymore.

Johnny’s death shattered my Grandmother and slowly disintegrated my Dad’s family. Within a few years Grandma and Grandad had divorced and my Dad was out fending for himself at the age of 15. Both Grandma and Grandad are dead now, and Dad’s siblings are scattered around the country – they don’t see each other very much.

Sometimes I wonder what our family would be like if Uncle Johnny was alive.

I wonder if he would’ve continued to suppress his true self and walked through life in a kind of personal coma, the real him screaming inside to be set free. Would he have had kids?

Or would he have said a big “Fuck You” to droving, to my Grandfather and to Queensland and run off to New York to be the dancer he longed to be?

I know one thing for sure, being a member of my family, he would be right royally fucked off that after all these years, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are still being discriminated against.

That young people are still killing themselves over their sexuality.

And that our government thinks it has the right to put its fucking bullshit politics ahead of love.

After almost 50 years, gay & lesbian couples are still being denied the same rights as heterosexual people, still being treated as second class citizens, still labelled as deviant, abnormal – illegal.

And I reckon he would proudly be rallying in Sydney on Saturday to show our government that Gay Marriage is something that we are not going to stop fighting for. That love and the public expression and commitment of that love through marriage is not something that any politician can use for their own political agenda, nor have the right to deny another human being to experience.

It saddens me that so little has changed since my Uncle Johnny killed himself. And that I’ll never get the chance to get drunk with him and dance like a crazy woman with him to Lady Gaga.

There is an undeniable amount of support for gay marriage in this country & we will not rest until the government changes the Marriage Act to be a fair and just one.

And throughout all of this, I’m going to make damn sure that NO ONE is ever going to have the will to dance taken away from them.

This one’s for you Uncle Johhny, and anyone else who who needs to keep the dance in them alive.

 

End original post.

 

There are some untruths in that version of what happened to my Uncle Johnny.

Johnny was only 16 when he killed himself, not 21- my Dad was only 9. Dad himself doesn’t remember exactly what happened or why, but he does know that it affected his family forever, especially my Grandmother.

Johnny was a “Mummy’s Boy” and was sent off to work to “toughen up” and be more “manly”. But it wasn’t as a drover, it was out working on my Dad’s Uncle Adam’s dozers – land excavation equipment. Still bloody hard work in hot, dry conditions, but with a family business.

Dad told me that he was told that Johnny had come in from the dozers for lunch and was happy, everyone thought he was starting to like the work. Then when it was knock-off time, he hadn’t come back, so they went looking for him & found him hanging from a tree. Apparently Dad’s Uncle Adam thought that there was something suspicious about Johnny’s death, but suicide was given as the official cause of death. Being a kid at the time, Dad can only remember the brother he knew and the pain left behind when he died.

As someone who knows what the barrel of suicide looks like, I also know that pretty much all the people in my life would have no idea that I’ve been in that darkest of dark places and could easily not be here today. They’d all be completely dumbfounded if I’d acted on those thoughts, because I masked them so well – the way I bet my Uncle Johnny did.

I asked Dad if Johnny was gay or not & he said he was too young to know. Johnny did want to be a dancer & that wasn’t encouraged, so maybe he was, who knows…

But you know what? It doesn’t matter if my Uncle Johnny was gay or not, what I do know from my Dad is that my Uncle Johnny was different and wasn’t “allowed” to be himself. He was made to change, to try and be what other people wanted him to be. Told to stop dancing.

All of these labels and identities our culture has about what it means to be a man, or a woman are complete bullshit.

The one label that fits all of us is that we’re people, human. We all laugh, dance, cry, bleed and love.

To try and compartmentalise love into good or bad, gay or straight is just fucking ludicrous. And to keep the public recognition of love only for the straights is what’s criminal to me.

How dare our government maintain this “marriage is between a man and a woman” bullshit.

Marriage has a long and ugly history, full of misogyny and pain. It’s only in recent history that we marry for love in the Western world, how on earth can our government say that one love is more worthy of marriage than another?

It’s discrimination in its purest form. It’s a deliberate act of singling out a group of people and saying “You are different and we don’t accept you.”

Changing the Marriage Act is far greater than “allowing” gay marriage – seriously, marriage is marriage. Gay people don’t breathe gay air, they don’t eat gay food, same as I don’t breathe straight air – know what I mean? Love is love.
Changing the Marriage Act is about allowing people to be who they are without fear or discrimination in all aspects of their life, to keep the dance alive within.

It’s about shining the light on the fear people have of others and letting the love in. About tearing down the identifications that try to contain and restrain us as people, and rejoices in the beauty of difference rather than try to wash it away.

What could be more noble than that?