John Burbidge’s last book was the biography of gay local writer Gerald Glaskin, now he returns with a memoir of his own.
The Boatman explores within a six-year time frame the sexual adventures in a coming-out process of the Perth-born writer. His job as a community development volunteer in India in the early 1980s gave him many an opportunity to discover his sexuality.
John Burbidge writing is fluid and engaging and written with such honesty, rarely seen since Holding the Man.
The book details many encounters that take place in a variety of situations and places; bandstands, dark-lit parks, railway toilets, back of taxis, riding around Calcutta having a three-way in the back of a friend’s car!
One of the more amusing stories was when he made love to young Indian man standing in a hot, crowded train. At first, I couldn’t believe that would be possible so I read that page more than once and the way John describes that moment is simply hilarious.
The most frightening was the opening chapter when he was bashed up in Bombay park and also later in the book when he hailed a rickshaw looking for some hot late-night action, he got the wrong Urdu word for young man and was instead was taken to a brothel and an 11-year-old boy. His escape from the brothel owners and the stand-over thugs had my heart rate racing.
At certain passages you can’t help but admire his bravery in seeking out sex partners, (he had a much higher sex drive than I had at his age), but on reflection the most endearing quality in this book is the brutal and very candid honesty that John is able to bring to his recollections of sexual discovery.
This is also a memoir of what it was like reaching out in the pre-Gaydar days and in a foreign land where males have sex with males, but don’t necessarily identify as queer. The taboos of a culture steeped in tradition, where the male is to be married and raise a family to therefore look after the parents in old age, would be a difficult one for a gay Indian man in the 1980s.
John explores this in selected passages and in a weird way echoes his journey as well as the struggles he faced with his own mother. When I turned the last page, I was pleased that I had untaken this journey and the myriad of characters from 30 years ago, I wonder now how their lives all turned out. It would be equally fascinating to go back and trace their stories as well.
This memoir is a must read.
Terry Larder
Read More
15-06-14 Discovering Gerald Glaskin
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Thanks for reviewing THE BOATMAN. I was particularly touched by Terry Larder’s reference to HOLDING THE MAN, which I happen to have read just recently (that comes with living outside Australia for so long) and was swept away by. It is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. It struck a deep chord with me, on many levels. In one sense, the story is about the gay adolescence and early adult life I never had growing up in Australia and had to wait another 20 odd years to experience in India. The writing was very skillfully done, especially Conigrave’s technique of revealing his inner thoughts along with the narrative. And the fact that John Caleo was not only a player of Aussie Rules but a very good one was the icing on the cake for me. Forty years later, Australia is still waiting for its first gay AFL player to come out and break down this bastion of homophobia and other bigotry (the treatment meted out to Adam Goodes et al just appalls me). Yet here was this young guy in the ‘70s who embraced both his homosexuality and “footy” and showed that the two are indeed compatible. What a trailblazer! I can’t wait to see the movie when it is released next month.