Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave

Author:Timothy Conigrave
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742284064
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 2009-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

The Next Three Years

The next three years were about acting school. Gruelling days followed by homework: writing diaries for voice and movement, practising dialects, creating movement pieces, working on scenes with other students. It was a very vibrant and creative experience but my psyche took a lashing as we were pulled apart, examined and reassembled. Lots of pop psychology was thrown around: we’d hear things like ‘You have a block with anger.’

I would compare myself to my classmates and feel inadequate. I was not the only one. In second year, when they tried to stretch us by giving us roles that were out of our range, a lot of us toyed with the idea of leaving, partly because we couldn’t see the horizon – graduation.

The friendships we formed were intense and dynamic. When you’ve rolled around on the floor together, undressed in front of each other, talked about your deepest feelings, mingled sweat, and farted in front of each other, there’s little left to hide. You’d have a best friend who would change with each project. A third-year student told me, ‘The friends you make here will be your friends for life.’

Those three years were also about Craig. He was a northern-beaches surfie with a barrel chest and icy-blue eyes that never quite looked straight at you. He was probably aware of their power. When he looked at me I felt he could read my soul. He was straight and had a girlfriend. He knew I was gay but it didn’t worry him. I never made a pass at him but I manoeuvred things so we’d sit together or have lunch together. I had always had a fantasy of friendship with a straight man, where we shared our deepest secrets. But my attempts at intimate discussions with Craig invariably failed.

‘When did you lose your virginity?’

‘Why do you need to know that?’

The ache of unrequited love appeared again. I started to wonder if this was an addiction, if I was like the women who always fell for married men. Watching Brideshead Revisited I was haunted by the eccentric homosexual Sebastian and his crush on his heterosexual friend Charles. I thought their relationship was like mine and Craig’s, but when I asked him if he thought so he didn’t know what I meant. I didn’t have the guts to explain.

It was never going to be anything but a friendship. I did the only thing I could do. I took him home in my head and made him a part of my nocturnal fantasies.

Those years were about being perceived as soft. On our first day we had sat in the steamy confines of the NIDA theatre listening to welcome speeches from the staff. The administrator told us about the industry week the school had run at the end of the previous year. There had been a panel of casting agents and the students had had a go at doing screen tests. ‘Barry, your movement teacher, gave a demonstration showing the girls how to be feminine and boys to walk like men, and not like they were carrying a handbag.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.