It’s Never Too Late To Come Out: Sumner Locke Elliott’s Fairyland

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Where art Fairyland? Sumner Locke Elliott’s final novel doesn’t pinpoint the exact location of its title. It could be Sydney, where the story largely takes place, or it could be its fatal destination: America, and specifically, New York. (You would have to instead read Elliott’s debut novel, Careful, He Might Hear You, to find the exact address: a picnic ground on the Lane Cove River). The novel opens and closes on the steps of the New York Public Library—though its a lesser-known side entrance rather than its quite literally lionised Fifth Avenue gateway—where the narrator is shot by a figure known to him from Australia. This dreamlike violence is reprinted verbatim at the book’s end, the repetition seeming to stress its artificiality in comparison with what comes both after and before. Let’s be clear: Sumner Locke Elliott was not killed in New York, but many of the details of his last novel are true to life.

Elliott was born in Sydney in 1917, and Fairyland was published in 1990, a year before his death from cancer. The novel is often, and rather fondly, recalled as Elliott’s late-in-life ‘coming out’ via fictionalised confession. Elliott transforms himself, or parts of himself, into Seaton Daly, a shy but not quite retiring type, weathering the many intolerances of his city of birth before his migration to mythic America. It’s a painful recounting of queerness needing to be expressed covertly. The reasons why were rather obvious. ‘He’s a poofter,’ one character observes of another. Elliott follows: ‘Only the Aussies could have devised such an apt and terrible word for it.’ Whether Australians invented the slur or not, they deployed it with gusto, evidence that the nation’s homophobia was no hidden matter.

‘Australia!’ the Los Angeles Times book reviewer, Carolyn See, exclaimed on finishing the book. The critic was glad when the novel was over but noted that there was ‘historical good’ in it. This virtue remains. In writing Fairyland, Sumner Locke Elliott produced the rare reliable account of gay male life in Sydney in the first half of the twentieth century.

There are explicit queer experiences mixed through the reminisces. Fairyland is no sexless zone. From the late 1920s until the mid-1940s, Elliott documents Seaton Daly’s excursions in schooltime group masturbation, casual nights in Eastern Sydney apartments, wartime side-of-the-road roughhousing and, perhaps most noteworthy, the subterrain of Wynyard Station, via its men’s bathroom, known colloquially as ‘Gomorrah’. This account of cruising is an important social record of the city’s hidden queer history: a personal archive of fond perversion, as well as mapping a site of danger.

Sumner Locke Elliott produced the rare reliable account of gay male life in Sydney in the first half of the twentieth century.

A gay elder solemnly counsels Seaton Daly in matters of love: ‘Dear, we are vulnerable, there’s no excuse for us under the sun…’ The scene at Gomorrah demonstrates the extremes of this vulnerability. The centre of Fairyland features an unpacking of the long, often rather tense friendship between Seaton and a curious men’s store clerk named Athol. Knocked back at last by this straight suitor, Seaton goes out and gets purposefully drunk, before heading to Gomorrah seeking quick relief and an affirmation of that which has been denied him. It is a high-risk environment, and Elliott ends the excursion with Seaton being severely beaten by a man he picks up at the beat.

Here is a grim foreshadowing of the monstruous worst of Sydney’s hate crimes to come: the targeted murders that potted the decades between the 1970s and 1990s of trans women, and gay and bisexual men. One might sit back and think this is all history, but read closer and you will see how little has changed nearly a century on: over the past year, in Victoria, groups of teenage boys have been charged with allegedly luring men via gay dating apps, such as Grindr, in order to rob and assault them in surprise attacks.

The rise of queer politics in Sydney and across other parts of Australia in the 1970s—long after Sumner Locke Elliott had left the city—focused on encouraging queer citizens to live openly, destigmatising homosexuality and pushing for law reforms in the process. Organisations such as CAMP Inc (Campaign Against Moral Persecution) and individual figures such as the academic, activist and author Dennis Altman made a new queer literary canon possible. Bisexual Frank Moorhouse’s libertarian push to chip away at the worst elements of Australia’s censorious print culture brought typically frank, and typical of Frank, sex to the page. The end results of these social revolutions are often thought of as gifts to future generations, but they can also be paid in arrears. Sumner Locke Elliott was freed up in the process. In her biography of the author, Sharon Clarke quotes Elliott saying that ‘after fifty years of secreting part of myself, writing Fairyland was like going to a psychiatrist, like fresh air coming into the room’.

Of course Gen X’s erotic autofictions were just around the corner too. Christos Tsiolkas published Loaded in 1995, and though Sumner Locke Elliott was born fifty years before Tsiolkas, their sexually explicit semi-autobiographies debuted at roughly the same time. While Seaton Daly is a more reserved figure than Tsiolkas’s hedonistic Ari, they both seek much the same thing: Ari and Seaton share a taste for masculine men who aren’t exactly a sure bet. The sex is, perhaps, more vociferous in Ari’s first-person expressions, but is no less present in Seaton’s accounts, even if Elliott stops short in some descriptions. Fairyland is just as loaded as Loaded (forgive me: full of loads).

Fairyland is just as loaded as Loaded (forgive me: full of loads).

Not everyone accepted the liberationists’ spoils in their own writing. Patrick White came along only grudgingly. In his biography of White, David Marr noted that when the public protests for queer rights began in 1971, White refused to join in: ‘I’ve marched in the streets, but only to get myself a man.’ He didn’t see a reason for sexuality to become a cause and was said to prefer others to ‘get on with their lives’. White lived openly with his partner of nearly fifty years, Manoly Lascaris, though did not want a fuss made. Nonetheless, in 1979, White published The Twyborn Affair, his first novel to deal explicitly with the love life of a queer character, the bisexual and gender fluid Eddie Twyborn. The novel featured an epigraph from David Malouf, whose 1975 semi-autobiographical debut, Johnno, undoubtedly inspired the older author (White told Malouf it was ‘one of the best books I’ve read by an Australian’ and the ‘only way’ to write about the love between men).

In his introduction to the reissued Fairyland, Dennis Altman ties Sumner Locke Elliott with Patrick White, born just five years before Elliott. They were both expatriates for a time, writing about Australia from a distance. Both found love in America (White very fleetingly). Remarkably, White and Elliott both attended Cranbrook School in Sydney, though Elliott was there on court orders (indeed, Altman’s introduction makes no reference to the rather obvious class difference between the two writers). Elliott was in fact raised by warring family members after his mother died the day after giving birth to him, and his father abandoned him. The palatial homes of Seaton Daly’s schoolyard friends—‘the little boys and girls all came from the big houses along Wentworth Avenue, Point Piper’—could well be based on Patrick White’s historic childhood home, Lulworth, in neighbouring Elizabeth Bay.

White lived off allowances from his family’s immense pastoral wealth, affording him time to launch straight into his high modernist experiments while still in his twenties, whereas Elliott’s early writing life was as a hired hand, first writing radio serials in Sydney and then unglamorous television in America, not turning to novels until his forties. White was famous for his testy relationships with friends but had a great admiration for Elliott. On finishing Elliott’s 1969 novel Edens Lost, White was pressed to write to the author:

Well! What a relief to read a novel about people of flesh and blood after the Australian stodge I struggle with on and off. I had come to the conclusion there was something missing from me which prevented me understanding an Australian novel. At the moment oafs and thugs are all the fashion, who express themselves in a stream of strine. The first once or twice was refreshing enough, but there is a little more than that to this place which I don’t exactly love.

There is a sense here that White is communing with an author with a similar queer sensibility. It was an unspoken acknowledgment, common to the experience of gay men of their generation, as Elliott put it: ‘We all knew about each other but you never said a word. There was a kind of rule about it, a gentleman’s agreement, you never discussed sex whatsoever.’ Dennis Altman also read Edens Lost when it was first published, ‘in the early days of gay liberation, both knowing and not knowing that only a gay man could have written this book.’

‘As Elliott put it: “We all knew about each other but you never said a word.”’

Practically an orphan from birth, Elliott searched out a sense of familial bonding throughout his life. He hungered for that which Patrick White and Manoly Lascaris shared. Yet, the longevity of such relationships continued to elude Elliott, as they did Seaton Daly. The quest, with its many dead ends, drives the picaresque narrative of Fairyland. This is played out again and again, particularly through the ever-evasive Athol, the figure in the novel least likely to make a loving partnership real:

The dream, wide awake and masturbatory, was of the two them abroad somewhere and it was unashamedly matrimonial. In the dream flat they had together somewhere in New York, they addressed each other in loving words, my dear, darling, and Athol came home to him. At times it went further. Athol was leading man in Seaton’s play that all New York was acclaiming. It stopped short, for curious reasons, of bed. It always stopped short of bed.

So it wasn’t just sexual liberation Seaton Daly was after but romantic freedom too: to live in a stable partnership, defined by home life, with the ability to say and display affection in certain public spaces deemed safe. But it was a dream that 1940s Australia could not promise him, let alone deliver. Potential, however, lived inside the mass of America, where ‘in a big city like Chicago or New York one could disappear into the maw of a huge heterogeneousness’. Here were the bars, and ‘even some restaurants’, that could provide refuge. This was the promised (fairy) land.

Elliott’s novel, then, is a story of escape. Its second part, set in America, deflates in comparison to what has come before because the tension of the novel is in what Australia does to its protagonist. Elliott does not sustain the dramatic arc once Seaton arrives in America and seems to lose interest in the plot, killing him off before the character has a chance to reach his long-desired romantic partnership. If an anthology were published today of the Australian queer canon, it would be hard to make a case for Fairyland to be left out—particularly the scene at Gomorrah—but this might be more for its social use than its literary achievements. Local historian Michelle Arrow has written that the topic of sex lives can frustrate historians as ‘sex typically leaves very few archival traces’. The rarity of Elliott’s account should, undoubtedly, be prized.

Eventually Elliott did find what he was looking for. He formed a loving relationship with Whitfield Cook, a screenwriter who had adapted Patricia Highsmith’s novel Strangers on a Train for Alfred Hitchcock. The couple shared summers together in the last decade of Elliott’s life, though only after Cook’s wife had died. Funny that life itself—true life—provided the fairytale ending denied to Fairyland.

Image credit: Our cover photo features a painting by © WH Chong for Text Publishing.

The black and white photo is by © Lorrie Graham, National Library of Australia collection.

KYD’s Queer Critic Series is supported by the Cultural Fund, the philanthropic arm of the Copyright Agency.