The Triumph of Eros Over Thanatos: The Imperishable Beauty of “Holding the Man”
The Triumph of Eros Over Thanatos: The Imperishable Beauty of “Holding the Man”
Originally published in Merion West, 19 July 2024.
A man sits at his desk by the window, clattering away on a keyboard. He is cold, and he is swaddled in blankets, with a beanie pulled tightly down over his head. He coughs constantly and often has to pause in his work while he overcomes a coughing fit. The man is dying and will soon be dead, but he is holding on until he finishes his book. Many years later, a friend recalls watching him at his work: He is “freezing cold…sitting there…papers everywhere…just madly writing.”
The book he is so desperately composing is the story of the great love—and greater loss—that has defined his life. He is immortalizing himself and the man he called his husband, the late John Caleo. He is setting down their life together, from high school sweethearts to AIDS patients. He is terrified of dying before he finishes, but his terror is misplaced: He will complete his book and only then—shortly after doing so—will he die, aged 34.
The man was the author, actor, activist, and playwright Timothy Conigrave, and the book that was published in 1995, the year after his death, is called Holding the Man. I did not know anything of the story of Tim and John until I happened upon a beautiful 2015 film based on the book. Since that first tearful viewing, I have revisited the film many a time (and foisted it on many a friend). I have also read the book itself, plus the text of the 2006 play based on it, and I have watched the 2016 documentary Remembering the Man, which features remembrances from people who knew the couple as well as photographs, video footage, and the voice of Tim himself, as recorded in January of 1993 for the oral history program of the National Library of Australia. (The details and quote above are taken from this documentary.)
In short, I am in love with the story of Tim and John. It has enchanted and devastated me for years now, which is why I will use their first names. They feel so familiar to me that I think I can get away with that presumption. Although Holding the Man is relatively well known in Australia and the play and film have had global success, I still feel that the story of Tim and John has not received the attention it should have. It is a tale of love’s paradoxical triumph over death, and it is universal, which makes it an antidote to the rigid and suffocating identity politics so prevalent today.
Tim and John meet and fall in love at an Australian Catholic all-boys school in the 1970s. The sweetness of the adolescent crush Tim had on John is the sort of thing everyone is familiar with, whether straight, gay, or bisexual: “I noticed a boy. I saw the body of a man with an open, gentle face: such softness within that masculinity. He was beautiful, calm. I was transfixed.”
John, “the boy with the amazing eyelashes,” is the captain of the football team, and Tim is a theatre kid. As in the high school Romeo and Juliet production in which Tim stars, their love is forbidden. Once Tim has successfully asked John to “go round with me,” they have to snatch kisses in secret. After a cinema date, John tells Tim that he wishes “we could hold hands properly.” Tim’s reply: “Maybe one day, when things change.”
This is particular to the gay experience, particularly the gay experience in the 1970s, but who cannot feel the sadness and yearning in these words? Who cannot identify with the pangs, with the triumphs and disasters, of teenage love?
On a much less exalted level (depending on how you see it), Holding the Man is perhaps even more universal—at least for men, whatever their sexuality. Here is Tim’s account of discovering the orgasm during an earlier encounter with another boy:
‘Kevin, get off me, gotta go to the toilet. I’m gonna piss myself.’ …I slid off the bed and stumbled out to the toilet. I stood at the bowl, holding the wall with one hand, trying to piss. But nothing happened…My pyjamas were wet, my stomach sticky. How embarrassing, I’ve pissed on him.
This leads Tim to an even more momentous discovery, perhaps the most momentous of any boy’s life: masturbation. Gentlemen, try and hold your laughter—and your embarrassment born of familiarity:
I grabbed my cock. It didn’t feel the same as when Kevin had done it, so I reversed my hand as though he were holding me…I was rubbing my cock against the pillow…It felt nice, weird…Oh God, I’m gonna piss myself again. I can’t believe this.
I bolted into the toilet. Jesus. What’s that? Claggy stuff was coming out of the head of my cock. I stood watching it spurt, mesmerized by its pulsing, dribbling. I stood in wonder at what had happened. In silence, reverent. Spoof! Sprog!
This raw honesty about sex, and about human bodies, is one of the best parts of the book, and it is present throughout, alongside the transcendent love. Sex and love are intertwined for Tim: The transcendence of love is impossible without the intimacy of sex. Later, after the boys have left school, Tim and John try their hand at anal sex. It is physical and more than physical: “I could feel his pulse through his warm moist rectum.”
At times, the frankness about (gay) sex might be a bit uncomfortable for some readers. But it is an essential part of the story. And it, too, is universal. Even if you cannot empathize with Tim’s difficulty in being the receptive partner during anal sex (confiding in a university acquaintance, he says, “My bum wouldn’t close and the come kept dribbling out for half an hour”), you can sympathize with the awkwardness of sex. Almost everyone finds it difficult and weird at first, and perhaps not only at first. And almost everyone finds it to be a necessary part of love. That is why Tim says that “[it] saddened me to have John’s and my lovemaking reduced to dick-in-the-bum mechanics, to fucking.”
Two bookending scenes beautifully capture this relationship between messy, bodily sex and transcendent, enduring love.
Tim and John’s first act of intimacy occurs during a school retreat. Their friends have made everyone sleep on the floor, so that “John and I could lie together without looking sus.” (The acceptance of their straight male school friends is one of the most endearing aspects of the story.) Throughout the night, “we would wake and start kissing, fondling, tugging and coming again. We were two suns, exchanging atmospheres, drawn into each other, spiralling into one another.” Thus are sweaty, sticky teenage hand jobs transformed into something numinous.
Much later, Tim and John have been diagnosed with AIDS, but John is deteriorating much more quickly. After a stay in the hospital, Tim brings John home, and John, though he is “skeletal” and hooked up to a drip, asks Tim to “screw me.” Some awkwardness ensues (“his tube swinging and getting caught up in our bodies”) but:
We persisted and eventually he opened and took me inside him. He leant back and pulled his cock and slid up and down on me. When he came there was very little fluid, another reminder of how unwell he was. …That was such a gift, giving of himself. I love him for it. We drifted off to sleep, content.
(In the film, I cannot help adding, this scene is rendered exquisitely: an achingly lovely song written by Rufus Wainwright especially for the film, “Forever and a Year,” is played over it.)
As well as being honest about the messiness of sex, Tim tells us how he continually hurt John. Tim insists on an open relationship, which John does not want, and he cheats on John more than once, even when the end is near. A lesser writer—and a lesser man—would have omitted this, but Tim does not spare himself from judgment. He feels terrible for hurting John, but he still does it, and yet dear, sweet John always forgives and forgets and becomes “himself again, as he had been after every other time I’d hurt him.”
When Tim learns that it was likely he who transmitted HIV to John (he had previously thought it was the other way around because John had had sex with others during a break in the relationship and was the worst affected), he is disconsolate: “[It] was awful to think I may have infected him. As though I have killed the man I love.” But I love Tim no less than I love John, precisely because of his honesty about his many imperfections and his selfishness. Tim passes Orwell’s memorable test: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.” (It occurs to me that Orwell, like Tim, faced off against death in a race to finish his finest book, Nineteen Eighty-Four.) Besides, there can be no doubt of the reality of Tim’s love for John, and Tim’s selflessness and devotion were as real and palpable as his selfishness and his flaws.
The conclusion of the book concerns John’s death in 1992 at the age of 31, a wholly devastating passage (and film scene), and its aftermath. Tim finishes off with a letter to John written on the Italian island of Lipari, having just visited John’s ancestral homeland, the island of Salina. Anyone who has ever lost a loved one, or who can even envision such a loss, will tear up when reading it. They will recognize these words, too: “You are a hole in my life, a black hole. Anything I place there cannot be returned. I miss you terribly.”
Whether he is talking about adolescent love, sexual awakenings, the awkwardness and joy of sexual intercourse, competing desires in relationships, the ignobleness of one’s own conduct and one’s regrets, breakups and reunions, or the loss of the beloved, Tim speaks universally. It is a gay story, and gay people face unique challenges and have unique experiences, but, in the final analysis, they are no different at root to anyone else’s. They are human problems, human experiences. The wisdom of Terence is a good guide here. Humani nil a me alienum puto: Nothing human is alien to me.
Although Tim has a keen sense of political justice—he becomes an activist for gay rights and AIDS sufferers—it is his humanity that shines through most of all (and it is this very humanity that makes him an activist for those oppressed and suffering groups in the first place). John is much less of a political creature than Tim (“Not everything has to be political,” John tells a pontificating Tim in high school). It is John, who pursues a modest career as a chiropractor rather than seeking the limelight of acting and activism, who reminds Tim of the sublunary, and perhaps it is only because of John’s humanizing influence that Tim’s book ends up being so universal. As Tommy Murphy, the playwright who adapted the book for the stage and screen, put it in his afterword to the Holding the Man playtext:
The voice of Tim the activist is present throughout the play and the memoir, but the urgency to speak is about more than politics. Tim’s Holding the Man transcends its era, it transcends sexuality and it transcends its nation of origin. It is the love story that takes centre stage.
Indeed. This is why the blurb of my copy of the book says that “Holding the Man explores the highs and lows of any relationship” (my emphasis) and why one of the film’s posters declares it to be a “love story for everyone.” Or, as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell put it a long time ago: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”
But it is more than that, as Murphy again tells us: Thanks to Tim’s memoir, “the young lovers transcend even death.” Here, though, is the great and terrible paradox: Love transcends death, but love, in the form of sex, is what brings death, far too soon, to both men (and countless others). And Tim’s immortalization of his and John’s story is only made possible by John’s death—and his own approaching one. As another friend puts it in Remembering the Man:
Tim always wanted to write and always wrote, but I don’t think he really ever found ‘the thing’ to write about, the thing he was meant to write, until John passed away. And probably what Tim was born to write was the tragic love story of John and Tim.
Sex and love lead to death; the death of the beloved and the knowledge of one’s own impending death lead to immortality. The horrors of the AIDS pandemic meant that sex, love, and death were intertwined for gay men perhaps more acutely than for anyone else in history. But the risks of sex and love, physical and emotional, are the risks everyone takes in life, and the certainty of death is the most truly universal thing binding humanity together. Besides, even if sex killed Tim and John, what is life without that sex? What is life without that love? It is nothing. It is death, as Hero and Leander well knew. At John’s deathbed, Tim says:
I placed my head on his chest and put my arm across him as though I was holding him to this world. The moaning vibrating through his chest sounded like our sex, emotional, the end of climax as we drifted off to sleep. It comforted me.
Christopher Hitchens, in his 2001 book Letters to a Young Contrarian, uses the Eros vs. Thanatos framework and champions the former over the latter thus: Sex, he says, is “a liberating force and also…the best riposte to the foul suggestions of death.” Even shorn of love, “fucking is its own justification.” Elsewhere, he espouses universalism:
The unspooling of the skein of the genome has effectively abolished racism. …My quarrel would be with anyone employing the term ‘interracial’ to describe a boy-girl encounter between any two humans. Or a boy-boy or girl-girl one, if it comes to that, which it most certainly will.
Meanwhile, “Beware of identity politics. I’ll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics.”
Hitchens nicely encapsulates the themes of this essay and the themes I see in Holding the Man. It certainly did come to that, after all.
Finally, as Murphy reminds us, Tim’s own “superhuman strength” in suffering from AIDS-related illnesses while writing is absent from his memoir. He ends with the death and remembrance of John. He does not tell us about the pain he endured while writing the book, and, of course, he cannot tell us about his own death. But the book is a testament to and overcoming of both, as it is also an overcoming of the bigotry and erasure he and John faced during and after their lifetimes.
Holding the Man is a paradoxical triumph of love over prejudice and life over death. It is a great love story and a great death story. It is a vindication of universalism over tribalism. It proves Salman Rushdie’s dictum that “Words are the only victors.” It is a truly great work of literature, one of the finest books to ever come out of Australia, and it deserves to be better known.
Many people misunderstand it, seeing it as a depressing tale of young love and young death—and so it is. But at its core is love. Yes, it deals with what Tim calls the “death-sex-horror-shit” of the AIDS era, but it is so much more than that. In his activism and writing, Tim wanted to transcend all that shit, to show “real people with lovers, family and friends.” In this he succeeded, and nowhere more so than in Holding the Man, one of the most life-affirming books I have ever read.
Postscript
I didn’t think to mention it in the original piece, but I have a habit of naming my cars, and my current little banger is named ‘Coni’. After, of course, Timothy Conigrave. (Previous car names include ‘The Thomas Paine’ and ‘The Poofmobile’. Yes, very mature, I know.)
