What Life is Really Like: On Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave

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Some years ago, after an event at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, I was driving an influential commissioning editor to the airport as a courtesy when the conversation turned to the ‘own voices’ movement. I was, and remain, cautiously openminded on the subject, and said, ‘There are two books about the gay experience that have knocked me sideways: Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx and Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave.’ Sensing the commissioning editor may have been similarly permissive about who gets to tell which stories, I added, ‘Of course only one of those is written by a gay author.’

‘And one of those books is much better written than the other,’ the editor replied with characteristic bluntness.

Assuming she held respect for a Pulitzer Prize-winning luminary such as Proulx, I was shocked that Holding the Man could be so summarily dismissed. The memoir is widely regarded as one of the most admired, deeply loved works of queer literature Australia has produced. Since its publication in 1995, the book has found new life as a much-performed play—adapted by Tommy Murphy, premiering in Sydney in 2006—as well as a 2015 film, directed by Neil Armfield.

I didn’t read Holding the Man until 2009, according to the date I inscribed under my name in the front cover of my copy, something I do in all the books I wish to keep until the end of my days. I can’t precisely say why it took me so long to read it. (I first read Brokeback Mountain when, in 1997, it was published as a standalone novella, and it has never lost its impact, partly because to my mind it’s about much more than gay cowboys.) Perhaps I knew that, at its core, Holding the Man concerned a real love affair destroyed by AIDS, and I would find it confronting. Perhaps, nonsensically—and mistakenly—I understood it to be a Melbourne story, so it wouldn’t resonate with me. Perhaps it was because I have always considered myself an outsider in the gay community; although I was born and raised in Sydney, I have spent my adult life away from that city and all it professes to offer.

I was shocked that Holding the Man could be so summarily dismissed.

Whatever the reasons for prevaricating, I eventually read Conigrave’s memoir. As soon as I finished the last page, I put the lead on the dog and spent the afternoon walking from Mount Ainslie to Mount Majura, a popular suburban trail on the edge of Canberra. I remember feeling mentally dislodged. I remember feeling a heaviness in my body. I also remember feeling an astonishing sense of connection.

Conigrave was born in 1959 and attended Xavier College, then Monash University in Melbourne. As a schoolboy he met John Caleo, a fellow student who was a keen and popular sportsman. The romance began almost immediately and continued for fifteen years, with both of them moving to Sydney where Conigrave studied acting at NIDA and Caleo became a chiropractor. Like Conigrave, I also fell in love with a classmate, although it must be said, I was too scared of those supposedly illicit feelings to act on them. With the weight of Anglicanism bearing down, no gay visibility and no language whatsoever to communicate my feelings, I believed a same-sex relationship, even if innocent—and emotionally insistent—was, in practice, an impossibility.

I was born in Sydney a decade after Conigrave, so by the time I was experiencing attraction to other boys, two major events were happening in Australian society. The first was NSW parliament debating whether or not homosexuality should be decriminalised (it would, in 1984, when I was sixteen). The second was what was initially called ‘the gay plague’ or ‘the gay cancer’. Although decriminalising homosexuality—at least, one form of homosexual sex—sounded like a good idea, I didn’t really want to be part of a community that was critiqued on the front pages of newspapers. At best, we were considered sad, lonely characters, even if some of us (though not necessarily me) could be entertainingly witty. At worse, it was said that, to protect ‘normal’ society, we should all be dumped on a deserted island and left to die. As to the disease that would so quickly ravage gay men, and the infamous ‘Grim Reaper’ advertisement, screened on televisions nationwide in 1987, which I remember watching with overwhelming alarm: I decided the best course of action was to do nothing sexual. Nothing. That way I might survive. It was okay to continue to fall in love with boys, but I would determinedly abstain from anything physical.

Timothy Conigrave was different. Holding the Man reveals a young man confident with his body, and with the bodies of other boys and men, most of whom seemed to know exactly how things worked. How did he have this confidence? Wasn’t he worried about being bashed, or merely rejected? What language did he use, and where on earth did he find it? Perhaps I wasn’t as observant, or didn’t want to be. It was easier to cocoon myself in a Brideshead-like world, much of which was in my head. Perhaps some boys were just more comfortable with their bodies, no matter what their sexuality.

As I walked the dog from Mount Ainslie to Mount Majura that day, I couldn’t help but mourn what I had missed. What joys—what bliss!—I could have experienced if I had been even just a little less frightened.

Inevitably, there were challenges for the couple, and they started to emerge before Sydney. Despite his love for Caleo, Conigrave wanted to expand his sexual horizons. He writes:

[E]arly in the summer of 1980, I had moved out of home and was lying in my flat in St Kilda looking at the palm tree outside my window. I was feeling so jealous of my friends’ exploits: picking up someone in a sauna, or going home with the spunk of the party. There were things I would like to try. I was nearly twenty-two and compared to my friends’ my sexual experience was limited. It had mainly been with John, and although it had mostly been good it hadn’t been very adventurous. And John needed the experience as much as me, I rationalised. I was the only person he’d had sex with. He might learn some tricks and techniques that would reignite our sex life. But how would I feel if I heard that he’d had sex with someone? I really didn’t know. And how would I bring this up with him? Maybe he was feeling the same things, but I suspected not. I didn’t want to hurt him.

In Holding the Man, Conigrave writes frankly about sex: the bodily machinations, the skin-tingling desires, the joys, the seemingly uncontrollable infidelities, but also the times when the outcome is a pervasive emptiness.

He and Caleo would eventually separate. But after the much-wanted time of sexual experimentation, they get back together, although for Conigrave the extra-relationship sexual adventures persist—until the world they built begins to crumble in 1985 after both men test positive for HIV. They remain relatively healthy until 1991, when Caleo is diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

What joys—what bliss!—I could have experienced if I had been even just a little less frightened.

Conigrave continues to write candidly about his and Caleo’s life together. Indeed, much of the memoir’s force comes from the fact that he is as explicit in his writing about disease as he is when writing about sex:

Tony, the registrar from the ward, appeared. ‘We’ve seen the X-ray and you have a pneumothorax, a popped lung. We’re going to put a pleural drain into your chest.’ They wheeled him into a cubicle and Tony scrubbed up. He asked John to open his pyjama shirt, sterilised his chest, referred to the X-ray, counted ribs and decided where to go in. ‘A little local first,’ he said, then punctured John with a needle. He then held up a metal tube cut at one end at an angle, so that it looked like a spearhead.

As I continued walking with the dog, my thoughts turned to the fact that in Holding the Man Conigrave was describing an illness that I might have contracted. Perhaps I was right to forego sexual contact from the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s, when I decided I needed to take some risks before what remained of my youth was lost forever. These days, according to the World Health Organisation, HIV is considered a ‘manageable chronic health condition’, though the WHO also points out that to date HIV has killed 42.3 million people, and in 2023 there were 40 million people living with HIV, 65% of whom live in Africa.

Throughout the memoir, Conigrave describes experiences that will be painfully familiar to many gay men of a certain age, especially those relating to family dynamics and friendships. He also doesn’t flinch when admitting, more than once, that there were times he found anal sex to be dirty, shameful; perhaps he was influenced by his Catholic upbringing or weighed down by ‘buggery’ jokes, which have been, and continue to be, prevalent in Australian society. By contrast, and often with mischievous humour, Conigrave shares the joy of companionship, the glorious release of being yourself—it is always worth it, he seems to be saying, even if it means a life is cut short. Two lives.

Last year, a decade and a half after my first reading, I returned to Holding the Man, fearing that either it would undo me again or, perhaps, I had grown so much as a gay man that it had lost some of its authority. But it did undo me. And it undid me again after I read the memoir for the third time, this year, in preparation for writing this reflective review. I still can’t help thinking that if I had been born ten years earlier, and had been more sexually adventurous, or just plain unlucky, my life could have ended the way Conigrave’s and Caleo’s did.

It is always worth it, he seems to be saying, even if it means a life is cut short.

But it’s a hollow thought. In many ways, I have lived their lives: it wasn’t so long ago, in 2017, during the final stretch of the Australian marriage-equality debate, that a family member emailed me, without cause, to say I ‘belong to an organisation that has committed atrocities to meet its own evil ends’. The fear of gay people remains in some parts of Australian society. Where I live now, in a regional NSW town, it would be a brave gay couple who walked up the main street holding hands.

But, in spite of all that, I have experienced the bliss of sex, the sweet thrill of intimacy, the comfort of love and the ongoing camaraderie of the shared gay life. For gay men of my era, we had three choices: become ourselves, no matter what; live a lie; or abandon life altogether. I’m glad I had the fortitude to become myself, no matter what.

Each time I re-read Holding the Man, I think of that commissioning editor on the drive to Canberra Airport. Perhaps what she was implying was that Conigrave’s prose, at times, lacks finesse at the sentence level, which, in her view, means it is not an exquisitely developed literary diamond. The memoir was edited by the eminent playwright Nick Enright, and it is tempting to imagine he was required to do a significant amount of work on the manuscript. However, despite Conigrave’s own impending death—he would die in 1994, at the age of thirty-four, shortly after he completed his book—this fearless artist documented one of the most tumultuous times in Australian homosexual history. More importantly, he demonstrates that living freely, openly and wildly is life’s goal. Despite the societal advancements relating to being queer, for many it can still be a rough road to travel. In 2025, for some members of the queer community, especially trans people, that road has become even rougher.

Ultimately, Conigrave wrote with immense and at times shocking power about nothing more or less than love, lust and loss, which is why Holding the Man will continue to have its place in the Australian literary canon. And that’s a salient reminder for all writers, especially those working now when, perhaps more than ever, the market rules the roost: literature that lasts has as its core a fierce, profound honesty, a story that says, Listen to me—this is what life is really like.

Image credit: Our cover photo features images from the Remembering the Man documentary, courtesy of Waterbyrd Filmz.

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