First, we named ourselves, then we told our stories

Abstract

This paper examines the emergence of overt male homosexual narrative in Australian fiction since the publication of Altman's 'Homosexual: Oppression and liberation' in 1972 and links the development of overt male homosexual narrative to the emergence of CAMP (established in 1970) and its offshoot, the gay liberation movement (established 1971). The first Australian novel with an openly homosexual point of view was 'No end to the way', published in 1965. It was banned on first publication. In 1972, Frank Moorhouse introduced gay characters into 'The Americans, baby'. This book is set in the same radical milieu from which the gay liberation movement grew. A gay press developed after the founding of CAMP, with 'William & John', 'Campaign', 'GLP: A journal of sexual politics' (or 'Gay Liberation Press'), 'Gay Changes' and other magazines beginning to publish overtly homosexual stories and poems in the 1970s. The first gay anthology, 'Edge city on two different plans', appeared in 1983, with a foreword by Altman. Distinctively homosexual works by Garry Dunne and Sasha Soldatow, both with connections to gay liberation, appeared in the 1980s. Altman's own 'The comfort of men' appeared in 1993. Nigel Triffitt's 'Cheap Thrills' (1994), Timothy Conigrave's 'Holding the man' (not a novel, but an AIDs memoirs), Graeme Aitken's '50 ways of saying fabulous', and Christos Tsiolkas' 'Loaded' (all 1995), Neal Drinnan's 'Pussy's bow' (1999), Henry von Doussa's 'The park bench' (2005) and Jeremy Fisher's 'Music from another country' (2009) all bear witness to the long legacy of gay liberation and the voice it gave to now openly homosexual writers.