Catching On - Introduction and link to issue

Catching On was the result of being invited to edit an issue for gay-ebooks' ongoing work in bringing gay writing into circulation.

In doing this Laurin McKinnon and Gary Dunne are continuing their great work in publishing under the BlackWattle Press imprint.

Introduction

Coming out stories need not apply.

No-one can bear them any more; we’re over them. Even though ‘coming out’ is still the necessary rite de passage into adulthood, sanity, health, maturity, independence, fun and fulfilment for the overwhelming majority of homosexual people in our type of country.

One still wouldn’t dare, as events in Malawi have shown, in the vast majority of countries.

But we’re over ‘coming out’ stories even though ‘coming out’ is a life long test of character even in our type of country – ask the elderly entering nursing homes.

So I asked for

100 – 3000 word accounts of your first awareness of a gay man.

It could be, in any tone, a dawning awareness that this person could represent your present and future in some way.

We are not asking for coming out stories per se but accounts of burgeoning consciousness.

‘Yes but what exactly is it that you want?’ was the response of many of those solicited.

I wanted them to tell me.

I wanted them to tell us in lively ways how they came to know they were gay.

This confrontation with ourselves must surely give us insights into human nature denied those who get to waltz at their own weddings, no matter how many frogs they had to kiss before they slipped the ring on.

This confrontation must inevitably involve coming to terms with another who represented for good or horrifyingly bad ourselves – our mirror, often (usually?) in which we did not want to see ourselves.

The stories that follow capture this burgeoning awareness in often very different ways. Directly autobiographical or not, they are rendered with various forms of abstraction and imaginative positing.

We have past worlds evoked for us which are tanged with salty breezes, dappled by willows trailing their fronds in slow rivers, blazing under the flailing arms of hills hoists reaching across prickly backyards, by the whiff of incense recently smouldered or of dusty files bound in pink ribbon. Last night’s Chardonnay might linger in more ways than one. We might wake to yesterday’s matinee still playing behind our eyes.

I would like to thank the contributors for their work and courage; many informed me that it was a worthwhile exercise.

I hope their readers are inspired and/or provoked into considering their own progress through the looking glass.

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http://www.gay-ebooks.com.au/downloads/co10.pdf