2026 Festival Blogger: Queerstories

What an honour to be part of Queerstories at this year’s Festival. To be in a room filled with such bravery, humour, heart and light.

Below is my story that I wrote and delivered at the event.

An image: My father, sitting on a white plastic patio chair under a frangipani tree, with one leg casually crossed over the other. The dainty twinkle of the fairy lights draped over the tree somehow heightens the sweet, sugary smell of its flowers.

I sit opposite him, looking out at the ocean below. We are both drinking gin and tonics and sharing a packet of Chicken Crimpies and guacamole – the cheap kind from Coles. It’s what my grandmother always buys. In fact, we are sitting on her porch. She’s away on a trip. She bought this place with her husband in 1968 for $27,000 (hold for collective property prices eye roll). A tiny little fibro shack atop a cliff at Whale Beach that has become the nest for our family. All of our fledgling has been done in this house.

The two of us, my father and I, have come for a weekend away together. We don’t know each other very well and this is a chance for us to change that. Our family dog, Jemima, a flat-coated retriever, is at our feet and every now and then she raises her expectant head, hopeful that she might be given a Crimpy.

Thank god for the view. Nothing allows silence to exist in a conversation like the pretend scrutiny of a vista. Neither party interrupting the other’s pretend reverie. The Pacific laid out before us seems to absorb our silence into its endless blue expanse. How can my father know so little about my life. About the big gay iceberg below it. He knows I’m gay, but that’s it. He knows nothing underneath that.

It’s quiet because I don’t know where to begin. I don’t want to disappoint him. My father, the economist. You know how people give their kids a nickname while they’re in utero? Things like Sunny or Bub or Avocado? Well I was called Maynard after the centre-left economist John Maynard Keynes. I’m a writer who spent $300 on Lady Gaga tickets and doesn’t understand tax. Sometimes I worry that I failed him before I was even born.

His phone rings. He looks at the number and rolls his eyes. It’s our neighbour from back home, 45 minutes away. Mrs Monk. A woman who has never let a word pass her lips that wasn’t a complaint and speaks with the angry, tight jaw of a cartoon monster. I can hear her through the phone she’s so loud. That damn dog of yours is barking again. I can’t stand it anymore. My father looks down at Jemima, her head resting on his Birkenstocks, and calmly replies, with a fairylight twinkle in his voice, “Well, Mrs Monk? That would have to be one hell of a loud bark, because she’s all the way up at Whale Beach with me”. He hangs up and winks at me, pats Jemima gently behind the ears. What charm. He’s who I want to be, I think to myself.

He takes a long sip of his gin, takes the ice in his mouth and crunches it just as I would. His mouth looks like mine and he has brown eyes just like me. He starts to tell me a story that I’ve never heard before. He was the head of the African desk of the IMF, working in Washington in the 70s. A couple of years in, he and his boss were ordered to travel to Sierra Leone to tell the President that the IMF wouldn’t give them any more money – too much corruption, too much waste. Not long before they went to see the President, the government had killed all of their own financial advisors for their shortcomings. Shot them in the head. My father’s boss told my father to go back to Australia, back to safety and his young family, that he would stay and handle this. But my father said no. He wouldn’t let him do this alone. They stood up to the President, the black metal of machine guns flashing by the sides of his guards. When they got back to their hotel, they breathed out, hugged each other and cried. Shaking.

I’m not sure why he tells me this story. But the bravery of it, the vulnerability of it, its proximity to death, make me want to speak.

Tell me something about you, he says.

With the power of the Pacific behind me, I tell story after story. Wave after wave. All the things that I have been too afraid to tell him. All the answers to the questions he’s never asked me.

I tell him about when I used to watch Lois & Clark in the early 90s and felt a tightening in my Under 10s soccer shorts every time Dean Cain changed into his Superman outfit.

I tell him about every Lynx-Africa-soaked high school crush that I had and the exquisite pain and lustful joy that accompanied them.

I tell him that I had sex with my friend, proper sex, for the first time, while we were house-sitting for a C-list celebrity in their 20th story penthouse. All the sliding doors of the wrap-around balcony were open and the wind was ferocious, whipping through the apartment, while Adele blasted and an aquarium full of piranhas menaced their way around an enormous dirty tank. And that I had never felt safer. Or more alive.

I tell him that I have been with my partner, Nate, for eleven years and how I love him so much that it makes me want to cry. That we actually went to the same school and spent six years in the same concreted 100m squared, eating our canteen sausage rolls and not knowing that we would one day fall in love and build a thrilling, kind, hilarious, trusting life together. And that I would love more than anything for them to meet each other.

I tell him that Nate and I found each other on Tinder ten years after we finished school and I asked him while texting, why would they need two different camel emojis? And he responded by telling me about the time he and his friend went on a camel ride in India and the man in charge said that Nate and his friend were on the wrong camels on account of their size so they needed to swap. If I was telling that story through emojis, Nate said to me, I might need two different camels. And I thought then, in that moment, that I could love him – this creative, funny, critically thinking, adventurous person.

I tell him that we are looking into surrogacy or fostering options to have a kid and that I find it desperately confusing, complex and dispiriting. How easily it can make a smart, loving, successful person feel like a poor, stupid criminal. To have to prove to a psychologist that we aren’t psychopaths, when every other day on the news there is a straight couple who have locked their kid in a basement or something. That we are just two men who would give a child so much love that they wouldn’t know what to do with it all.

I wonder nervously what my father might think of that? Is he the perfect father that exists in my head who would do anything to help us try and make sense of it all? Maybe even help us pay for it? Would he be the kind of grandpa who would sit patiently and teach his grandchild chess? Letting them win until he doesn’t need to anymore? Or is he the rules-based economist who thinks that it’s not the natural order of things?

I tell him how every day I feel so deeply proud to be gay. That I feel so lucky that, in my tiny corner of the world, it’s actually the gays that are free. Free to cross their legs, talk, laugh, dance, emote, dress how we want. That I feel sorry for straight people. You know those men who think it’s gay to put on suncream or whatever? I mean, how exhausting. What a stupid little prison.

He sits patiently and listens to everything I have to say. Eventually, he takes a Crimpy, eats half of it and offers the rest to Jemima. His breath seems held up high in his chest. I notice that mine is too.

He uncrosses his legs, pulls himself out of his chair and kneels down beside mine.

He wraps his arms around my whole body and hugs me tight. An embrace that smells of aftershave and salt and gin and flowers.

We breathe out, hugging each other, crying. Shaking. It’s as though his Sierra Leone story was in service of this moment. That he was trying to tell me there was nothing I could say that would scare him.

***

But… this never happened. I never got the chance. My dad died when I was four years old. From cancer of the stomach. Of the guts.

My story isn’t true. I mean, everything in it happened, just not like that. I never got the chance to have that conversation. The Sierra Leone story happened, but my mum only told it to me a few months ago. And the phone call with Mrs Monk happened. In fact, it’s one of only a handful of memories I have. Another one is showing him my first ever pair of tiny brown school shoes, the day before I started kindergarten while he lay on a cold bed in the hospice. I remember the nurse’s shoes clopping loudly on the cold tiles outside. I also remember feeding him mashed banana while we watched the Australian Open and he lay in the living room on a bright blue cushion with palm trees on it. As well as a flash of him holding me on his hip, both of us wrapped in orange towels by a public pool somewhere. Though that might have just been a photograph I saw once and reanimated in my head…

I often wonder how much of our own story a parent is entitled to? None, I guess. But by gosh would I give him all of mine if I could. If I got the chance. If he were around to ask me to tell it to him over a Chicken Crimpy, some guacamole and a gin and tonic, somewhere under a frangipani tree.