Road Movie may be about HIV and AIDS but it’s not a grim tale. Robin Usher meets the actor/producer bringing it to Melbourne. QUEENSLAND actor Dirk Hoult is only 30 but he vividly remembers his childhood terrors brought on by the Grim Reaper campaign and other dour ads warning people against the dangers of AIDS. [...]
Fitzroy’s gay and lesbian bookshop is celebrating with 100 writers and a poetry slam. EMERGING writers face a gargantuan task getting their work read. But the job is even harder if you happen to be gay, lesbian or transgendered. Behind every Chris Tsiolkas and the late, great poet Dorothy Porter, is a queue of queer [...]
Where: Hares & Hyenas Date: Sunday 29 January Time: 5pm Price: Full $15; Conc $6; Group 6+ $10 +BF So, you are under 25 and you’ve never read any of your work before in public. Or maybe you have, and the experience was a bit traumatic. Or else, you are just really good at reading in public [...]
Dude Magazine is a creative resource presenting information on transitioning, safer sex and personal stories by transguys from around the world, aimed at the wider community. Creator and editor-in-chief Jez Pez introduces Dude. 2: “Delve deeper into this complex abyss of body image where we uncover a world where not everyone thinks it’s hot to be [...]
Road Movie may be about HIV and AIDS but it’s not a grim tale. Robin Usher meets the actor/producer bringing it to Melbourne.
QUEENSLAND actor Dirk Hoult is only 30 but he vividly remembers his childhood terrors brought on by the Grim Reaper campaign and other dour ads warning people against the dangers of AIDS.
”They terrified me,” he says during a break from rehearsing a classic one-man play from the early AIDS era, Road Movie, that will have its Australian premiere in the Midsumma Festival.
”It is a terrific play and its ideas about the fear of HIV are still relevant,” he says. ”It can raise awareness among young gays even if it is now a liveable disease like so many others.”
He stresses that the play is also of wider interest because of its literary merits. ”It’s a bloody good story that really rockets along.”
Road Movie by American Godfrey Hamilton made its debut at the Edinburgh Festival in 1995 where it won the fringe first award and the performer, Mark Pinkosh, won the inaugural stage award.
Hoult met the pair, who have been together for 30 years, in England in 2010 where they presented the play at Manchester’s Queer Up North Festival. He then joined a British tour of the production as the lighting and sound operator.
”I was very lucky to be able to get to know them so well. Godfrey was inspiring and he has allowed me to present his show in Melbourne,” he says.
The play tells the story of a hard-living New Yorker, Joel, who is travelling across the US to be reunited with his lover, Scott. On his odyssey he meets mothers remembering dead children, visits the Vietnam Memorial and recalls lovers and friends lost to AIDS.
”It’s not a dark play,” Hoult says. ”There are moments of beauty and side-splitting laughter.”
He plays three women and two men and deals with dialogue between characters by slight changes in his stance. In the last scene, on a Californian houseboat, Joel meets ”a hippie woman with piercings”, each representing people who have died from breast and ovarian cancers or AIDS.
”The themes of love and loss are always relevant,” Hoult says. Joel is an alcoholic at the beginning, but Scott reminds him that ”staying alive is the more interesting choice”.
He says the play represents a contemporary gay voice that people can respond to. ”[The movie] Brokeback Mountain was inspiring for the queer race, but it still ended badly.”
Hoult moved to Melbourne from Brisbane last year and taking on Road Movie is part of his search for a more rewarding career.
”This is a big challenge for me because I am taking it to the Adelaide Fringe in March,” he says. ”I have produced bits and pieces … but this is the biggest project by far.”
Acting is a hand-to-mouth profession for most young practitioners, and it was no different for Hoult, who graduated from the University of Southern Queensland in 2001.
But his break came with a role in The Kursk, a play about the doomed Russian submarine in which 118 sailors died.
The show toured nationally in 2009, including playing at the Clocktower Theatre in Moonee Ponds. ”Despite that, I still think of Road Movie as my Melbourne debut.
”As a result of the tour I was financially able to take on something big and that was when I decided to go to the UK.”
One of his last northern projects in Brisbane was the Queensland Music Festival production, Behind the Cane, about the shameful blackbirding industry in the 19th century when Pacific islanders were abducted to work in the northern canefields. ”It was a great success with a combined audience of about 7000 people over three days,” he says.
”It was a great way to finish up before heading south to see what opportunities Melbourne can provide.”
Road Movie is at the Gasworks Theatre, Albert Park, from tomorrow until Saturday. Book at gasworks.org.au or phone 9699 3253.
Fitzroy’s gay and lesbian bookshop is celebrating with 100 writers and a poetry slam.
EMERGING writers face a gargantuan task getting their work read. But the job is even harder if you happen to be gay, lesbian or transgendered.
Behind every Chris Tsiolkas and the late, great poet Dorothy Porter, is a queue of queer writers jostling for space on the bookshelves.
And thanks to shop owners Crusader Hillis (yes, his real name) and his partner Rowland Thomson, these days they are getting the chance.
This year the pair celebrates 20 years of running the peculiarly titled Hares and Hyenas, one of only a handful of gay and lesbian bookshops in the world, in the heart of Fitzroy. (The idea for the name came from the book, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, by John Boswell, in which we learn that hyenas were once considered homosexual and hares were thought to have multiple vaginas.) To mark the occasion, Hillis and Thomson are hosting The Word Is Out – 20 events ranging from book launches, readings and performances to a poetry slam, as part of the 2012 gay and lesbian Midsumma Festival.
Emerging gay writers from all over Melbourne will get their six minutes of fame and a chance to step into the spotlight as the shop pushes back its bookcases (literally, as it turns out, because they are all on wheels) and morphs into a snug venue, complete with purple flock wall paper, theatre lights and seating for 75.
They will appear next to well-known trailblazers such as Noel Tovey, author of Little Black Bastard, who will read from his work-in-progress, Sydney author Jesse Blackadder, and Brisbane writer Benjamin Law.
The literati will also include Tsiolkas himself – who launched his first novel, Loaded, at the store at its first home in South Yarra – joining editor Sophie Cunningham, professor of politics and novelist Dennis Altman, Neal Drinnan and Kim Eastwood.
”We have always mixed well-known writers with unpublished ones,” Hillis says. ”It is really a starting ground for some people.”
For the first time, the event has been funded by the City of Yarra, which means the pair can pay industry fees to the 100 writers appearing. This year they have their first intersex guest, the mayor of Hobson’s Bay, Tony Briffa. Says Thomson: ”Transgender writing and performance would be one of the real strengths that has emerged in the 20 years since we started.
”We are calling it a transcultural explosion. It used to be men to women but now there’s a lot of female to male people represented.”
While Hillis and Thomson have never encountered any obvious prejudice regarding their sexuality and the shop has never been the target of vandalism (unlike others in Britain) the pair recognised early on that discrimination or simple ignorance is not always so overt. Gay and lesbian writers were not getting much of a look-in at mainstream bookstores and punters didn’t have many places to go to find the literature they wanted.
On the face of it, Hares and Hyenas looks much like any normal bookstore, except for the explicit comic section and the coffee table books that might make granny blush. There’s a big romance and crime section rolled into one – (lesbian readers love both these genres, says Hillis) and sensitive books explaining artificial insemination and surrogacy to children.
With Australia having come a long way in its understanding of normality, Thomson is asked if that might make the need for a gay festival like Midsumma redundant? No, he says. ”There is a gay rights aspect, but it is also a celebration and a chance to learn from each other.”
The Word is Out: until February 4. For more information, hares-hyenas.com.au
Where: Hares & Hyenas
Date: Sunday 29 January
Time: 5pm
Price: Full $15; Conc
$6; Group 6+ $10 +BF
So, you are under 25 and you’ve never read any of your work before in public. Or maybe you have, and the experience was a bit traumatic. Or else, you are just really good at reading in public and want every opportunity to get your work heard.
Rapid Fire has presented about 30 times since the first Rapid Fire in 1995. The recipe is simple: give 12 writers six minutes each to read, with the order drawn from a hat on the night; and ensure that merciless writer-wranglers are on hand to get them off the stage quickly if they go over time. This formula provides the
perfect platform for writers to refine, condense and edit a story, while providing ample time to display their literary brilliance. A win for writers and the audience alike.
We are looking for poets, writers, bloggers, zine makers, in fact anyone with an opinion they want to share or a story to tell. Poems, prose, songs and even rants about something that’s important to you all welcome! The six minutes is for you to use in any creative fashion. You can even have use of a data projector and not even speak if everything you want to say can be said in pictures or visual text.
The audience are very forgiving. It’s only six minutes out of their lives, even if it feels much longer to you. Also, each writer will receive at least $30 for their six minutes.
To help you have the best possible experience, we also offer feedback on your story if you send it to us a week before the event. During this process we will make sure the story fits within six minutes, give you some feedback about the power of the story and how it might work in a performance setting. We’d even make suggestions about places where you might want to pause if it was going to give the story better impact. Of course, you don’t have to use this service, if you don’t want to.
For event details please visit Hares and Hyena’s website. This
event is supported by Minus 18 and YGender. Please contact wordisout@hares-hyenas.com.au or (03) 9495 6589 for details.
Dude Magazine is a creative resource presenting information on transitioning, safer sex and personal stories by transguys from around the world, aimed at the wider community.
Creator and editor-in-chief Jez Pez introduces Dude. 2: “Delve deeper into this complex abyss of body image where we uncover a world where not everyone
thinks it’s hot to be a muscular, tattooed, post-op, bro type trans guy… I long for a world where anyone and everyone can feel included, attractive and sexy”.
“a sexy and fabulous transmale magazine”
“[DUDE] took Melbourne by storm and it was a huge hit.
There had never really been anything like it before in Australia…”
Dude. is free. Download it at dudemag.org
High res images and press copies of the new issue available on request.
Media inquiries:
Jez 0425 539 995 DUDEtranszine@gmail.com | dudemag.org
GLOCKIDS is a peer support organisation run by Coming Out Australia for the following:
*Gay and lesbian people who have had children through a heterosexual relationship.
*Partners of gay and lesbian people with children
*Children of gay and lesbian people who were conceived through a heterosexual relationship
*Same Sex Co-parenting couples.
*Step Families in the GLBTIQ Community
*Family members of the above.
If you are looking for workshops in relation to Coming Out, Being Young and Gay and Relationships, these workshops maybe for you.
These workshops are run by trained facilitators from the Victorian AIDS Council/Gay Men’s Health Centre.
For more information click about each workshop:
Momentum
Young And Gay
Relationships
I saw the so called “Libra get Girls” Libra Tampon ad for the first time today, to find out what the fuse was about on facebook, regarding it being transphobia…..
I had been following the comments going around through friends and others on facebook. I wanted to watch the ad first before commenting about it.
Here we are trying to educate the general public about the gay, lesbian, bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer community And Libra promotes an ad that is simply attacking the GLBTIQ community as worthless piece of human being…. I am not attacking Sandy, the Drag Queen in the ad, as i do not know her, and i am sure she needs to pay her bills, like everyone else, but the ad could have been done more tasteful, did Libra really need a drag queen/transgender person to show the tv public that “Libra gets Girls”???….. It was a bit of tit for tat, until the girl pulls out a tampon, because she could not out do Sandy…. It was abit like look I am better then you, I can use a tampon and you can’t, so there fore you are below me!!!!!
Even though the statement was unspoken, it was certainly implied. If Libra was trying to be funny and humorous, it certainly missed the point “big time”. Did they consult anyone else in the GLBTIQ community, preferably a transgender person about how the ad could affect the community, instead of a drag queen, who is looking for fame (because is that what drag queens do??) I am sure a transgender person would not put themselves in that position to be degraded and ridiculed by the viewing public.
I encourage you to sign the petition http://www.change.org/petitions/boycott-libra-productscompany
Even though the ad has been withdrawn, we still need to sign the petition, to make sure it does not happen again….
Below is the ad, if you have not seen it….
When I first heard about this clip, I thought it was just another wishful attempt to get the Gillard Government’s attention about same sex marriage and it would just to the wayside…..
That was until I actually watched it and realised that was an amazing clip and it showed real people, with real emotions, real feelings, and real lives…. I am one of those people who hopes that one day, I too, will be able to marry my partner legally…. A friend said to me the other night ” I would like to know what the real issue is for not allowing same sex marriage??”. That is something I would like to know too.
I know that same sex marriage will be legal in Australia, it is only a matter of time!!!! I really do hope that the time is now!!!!
Enjoy the clip…..
I must say I am disappointed the committee decided to drop the gay and lesbian wording of the mardi gras. For people coming out, young and old, need a community to belong and one part of that community is the GAY and LESBIAN Mardi Gras.
This is a kick in the guts for the pioneers of the Mardi Gras in the 70′s, when it was a political movement for gay rights and in the 80′s to include Lesbians. Have we lost our marbles or what?? the Mardi Gras is time of celebration for the Gay and Lesbian community (and I am referring to the wider GLBTIQ community) and we should not bow to the pressures of the straight community to make them feel more comfortable about our celebrations.
We are still fighting for equality and we need keep the pressure and force corporations and governments to acknowledge our existence. We cannot and should not go down the path of excluding the main focus part of the celebration. The words “Gay and Lesbians” are powerful words in the wider community and should be continued as the pinnacle of the community…. Yes the community is changing, with the inclusion of bisexuals, transgender, intersex and queer. Let us show the wider community that we are growing community and a community of acceptance, and we still believe in our core values and are proud of who we are and our history and we are not afraid to show it.
I might as well not have an identity in the wider community, just be another closeted person, who is gay…. It is like a car company removing it’s badge from it’s car and the car has no identity….
