In a remote corner of the globe lies the island of Australia. Surrounded by three oceans and one sea, Australia is completely isolated from neighbouring landmasses. It has been this way for a long time. It was about 30 million years ago when Australia broke off from Gwondona, a former supercontinent. Because of its isolation, Australia's plants and animals evolved along completely different trajectories than those on other continents. For example, stepping into an Australian forest feels like stepping into a scene from the Cretaceous period. Tall, thin stalks of trees with dense canopies of dull-green leaves shade the brush below, draped in fog and flush with massive ferns. The environment looks largely unchanged from a time when megafauna roamed the earth. This is no accident. Indeed, it was around that time that Australia became an island, dramatically reducing the threat of competition from invasive species. Similarly, large marsupials like kangaroos, koalas, and wombats are the dominant herbivores, living their lives without the fear of predation given they are protected from the carnivorous predators that exist on other continents. Isolation is somewhat of a pejorative term in today's connected world. But in Australia, isolation has been a godsend, providing a mechanism through which the island's unique plants and animals can thrive.
Australia's isolation has been used for punitive purposes, too. Everyone knows that the British sent criminals to the island as punishment in the late 18th century. The actual statistics behind the event are astounding. More than 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia during this time, just shy of the 200,000 free settlers who willingly migrated over this period. The island was so remote that it was often the convicts themselves who, fresh off of a journey around the world, were forced to build the very prisons that would later house them. The situation was all the more ironic given the context in which it took place; directly adjacent to some of the most beautiful and pristine white-sand beaches in the world, surrounded by untouched forests and curious animals, all bathed in a humid subtropical climate. It's as if the British magistrates who decided to send the country's convicts to Australia chose the island based on its geographic isolation alone, without realizing it might actually be a pleasant place to live. Moreover, once their sentences were over, many convicts got a head start ahead of other migrants in building lives for themselves in what was then becoming a growing nation. Some even stuck rich early on in the gold rushes of the 1850s, providing them with the financial capital to buy property, start families, reintegrate into society, and finally enjoy the white-sand beaches. It was Australia's isolation that was initially used as the mechanism for punishment, but as was the case with Australia's plants and animals, Australia's isolation proved to be the mechanism through which early convicts were eventually able to reintegrate themselves into society.
A lot has changed in Australia since its early colonial period. Since that time, the island's settler population has exploded from 430,000 in 1851 to 26 million today. Many of them live in international hubs like Sydney and Melbourne and enjoy one of the highest qualities of life in the world, financed by a productive export and resource-based economy that is heavily connected to global markets. Yet, Australia is still geographically isolated. Its forests remain unchanged. Even Australian humour, dark and caustic, echoes a miscreant past.
I heard these echoes for myself when I visited Australia in September 2014. Or perhaps I cued to these echoes, given I was feeling a lot like a convict at that time in my life. A bad breakup left me feeling like a total failure. As many first relationships go, I had bloated it with all of my dreams, aspirations, and insecurities, so much so that it capsized under the weight of my expectations. The experience was devastating. I had never felt like such a social pariah. I realized, too, that as a young gay man I was trying to use the relationship to circumvent the discomfort I experienced with being a gay man in society. If only I was successful, well-off, and had nice things, I absurdly reasoned, people would overlook that I was gay. Of course, making your discomfort the responsibility of another person is not a sustainable solution, as it gives that person more responsibility than they likely consented to or, worse, a kind of coercive control over the emotion. As a young person, I hadn't yet learnt these lessons. I was still naive. Now, also hurt, and in Australia, wondering if isolation would do me some good.
(1) Stateless Convict. (2014). Taken by friend.
My Australian destination was the city of Melbourne. An odd choice, considering Melbourne doesn't boast the beautiful beaches or warm climates of Australia's more northern metropolises, Sydney, Perth, and Brisbane. Melbourne is much colder, with winds all the way from the Antarctic blowing through during the winter months. As a result, Melburnians spend more time indoors than their northern cousins, cultivating their creative and intellectual pursuits as opposed to sportier hobbies, enough so that Melbourne is now considered the country's cultural capital.
Melbourne's urban form played a role here, too. Culture — the best culture — needs time to incubate in safe spaces, isolated from the norming forces of society at large. Isolation also provides the mechanism through which experimentation can occur, allowing people — often young ones — the freedom to fully embody their emotions without fear of judgment, uncovering new forms of cultural expression in the process.
As it would turn out, Melbourne is full of isolated spaces. The Central Business District (CBD) features hundreds of narrow laneways that split in between buildings, creating a maze of pedestrian-only pathways. The laneways were built in the 19th century to provide back entry routes to properties fronting the main thoroughfares. Given their concealment, the laneways were quickly repurposed for clandestine activities, providing refuge to the city's criminal underbelly and red-light businesses. Today, the laneways now house hundreds of cafes, restaurants, bars, and shops, adding a humane layer to an otherwise generic downtown. Many laneways are completely covered in street art, embodying the city's creative spirit. There are even guided laneway tours for sale. Although, in my opinion, they are more for getting lost in.
(2) Melbourne Laneway. (2014). Taken by the author.
Melbourne's isolated spaces don't stop in the CBD. A short walk north of the CBD are the neighbourhoods of Fitzroy and Collingwood, isolated from the financially focused CBD. Despite their proximity, these two inner-city areas have maintained a bohemian atmosphere. You can find eclectic bars and restaurants mixed in with old-victorian housing. Street art covers narrow backstreets, and small galleries sit alongside corner pubs and terrace houses. As was the case in the CBD, the diversity of creative spaces, coupled with their stochastic integration into the existing urban fabric make for a city experience characterized by surprise, serendipity, and secrets, exactly the context best suited for new forms of emotional and cultural expression to emerge.
I spent a lot of time in these areas during my 3-months in Melbourne. I needed to find new forms of emotional and cultural expression. Ones that were better suited to accommodating my most basic needs than what I was previously operating with. Luckily, I had rented a flat next to Carlton Gardens, sandwiched in between the CBD and the neighbourhoods of Fitzroy and Collingwood. The location provided me with a launching pad for my various urban adventures, many of which would occur in the evenings and on weekends when the creative class milled their way through the city. It's easy to fall in love with Melbourne at this time. It was early spring, and the setting Australian sun would ignite the sky with vibrant reds and pinks, providing a backdrop for the silhouettes of the massive skyscrapers clustered in the CBD. I remember walking down Smith Street, Fitzroy's main drag, one Friday evening, watching the urban theatre play out around me. Trolley cars buzzed commuters home, past the inner-city bars and restaurants that were setting their tables and turning on their neon signs in preparation for the evening crowds. Students weaved their fixies through traffic as pedestrians crisscrossed their way to meet their mates and dates. The hipsters walked their toy bulldogs. Then, me, in the middle of it all, trying to find my place.
The cast of characters was diverse and dynamic and offered me new and exciting possibilities. Despite the city's isolation, Melburnians have forged and maintained social conduits with many of the world's other cultural hubs, including Berlin and Brooklyn. It's not unlikely to meet Australians in the art scenes of either of these cities, with many eventually returning to Fitzroy and Collingwood after their visas have expired, bringing their experiences and insights home with them. For this reason, the Fitzroy and Collingwood crowd is undeniably cool, but a cool that's blended with a blue-collar, irreverent and slightly-inebriated energy that is uniquely Australian. The men sip coffees in long-fit loose-neck T-shirts while sitting on milk crates, discussing new architectural designs and fashion trends. The women smoke cigarettes over wine in their overalls, strategizing a new app launch or regaling their latest Missy Higgins run-in. Butch biker men coming from St. Kilda beach brapbrapbrap by on deconstructed Harleys, parking their hogs next to bars filled with flannel-leathered bros spilling out into the street, beers in hand. I remember watching one tattoed biker bro park his bike, dismount, walk up to another one of his beefy bro friends and kiss him on the lips.
"Woah." I thought. Clearly, they were more than friends.
It was initial experiences like this that let me know I was on the right path. After months of feeling like a stateless convict, it was time for me to try out new forms of self-actualization. But I needed help. Serious help. My previous relationship failure had made it clear to me that I was unequipped with the knowledge needed to construct a meaningful life. I felt as though my healthy and loving family upbringing supplied me with the right pieces — honesty, kindness, trust, joy, and love, but something was preventing me from putting them all together. I couldn't figure out what it was although I knew it had something to do with my gay identity. I knew that my fear of fully embodying my social condition had driven me to choose a partner who was just as insecure, making the success of our relationship contingent on us being identified as anything other than gay. Absurd, yes, I know, but arguably a rational reaction against societal homophobia which, mere decades before, caused significant hardships for gay men. Being "in the closet" had more to do with survival than shame. Recent advances in social thought have radically improved the position of gay men in society, but ideas of masking, closeting, self- and other-censorship remain, unfortunately, entrenched in the psyches of many gay men.
By what mechanism can one begin to dismantle these fears? Truly, that's the big-ticket question for which no simple answer exists. At the very least, I knew isolation from the social forces that contributed to my failed relationship was a good start. I also knew I needed human connection, but now a qualified kind, with other gay men specifically, and preferably ones embodying more self-actualized forms of being. Without any clues of where to start, I took it upon myself to wander Melbourne in search of answers.
I knew, though, that I wasn't completely aimless. I already had a compass on hand. It was my internal "culture compass" that had been acutely calibrated from years of living in Montreal and New York. It helped guide me through the urban landscape of both cities to extract the resources I needed. You may think, how could anyone go wrong in Montreal or New York, where everything is paradigmatically cool? The truth is there are many spaces in both of these cities, as there are all over the world, that commodify culture as opposed to providing the conditions for which it can emerge. This is an important distinction that may read as superficial, but for aesthetes, culture vultures, suburbia refugees, and — yes — gay men, it is of existential importance. Many of us experience a sort of identity collapse in cities and spaces that push cultural norms on us. We know — sometimes only implicitly — that the most meaningful cultural products and embodied moments are emergent. Emergent meaning is a bottom-up phenomenon, depending on a complex and shifting soup of factors irreducible to the methods of science. Emergent meaning can be a slow bubble or a sudden eruption, and is almost always driven by emotion as opposed to disembodied syllogistic reasoning. Culture is inherently an emergent phenomenon. Identity can be, too. Love — in its purest form — absolutely is. Given the importance these constructs play in processes of self-actualization, it is no surprise that gay men have highly tuned culture compasses, sensitive to the extent to which different contexts, including cities and spaces, may or may not support their own processes of self-actualization. Emergent meaning is also the reason why real estate in New York, London, and Paris will forever be expensive. Investors have figured out that cities that have enough history and spaces that afford emergent meanings are irreproducible, making these cities highly valuable.
This theory also explains why casual, blue-collar, DIY minimalism became the dominant aesthetic of the aughts and 2010s. These spaces were largely a reaction against the religiosity-infused over-bearing Regan-era ethos of the 90s. They asked very little from patrons in terms of dress and cover is usually pay-what-you-can. Divey gay bars excel in this regard. They can be some of the most paired-down, casual, basic spaces you've ever been to. The types that make you want to just straighten the posters on the walls yourself. They impose very little "top-down" meaning. But as a result, patrons infer permission to fully embody their identities. They can be who they are without fear of external judgment. Moreover, meaningful moments, whether they be in the form of a laugh, a hug, a look, a dance, or a kiss, can emerge within these contexts in ways and at intensities that are simply impossible in other spaces. In other words, isolation, including within cities, can be a godsend for people highly sensitive to external control. As if guided by destiny, my Friday night wanderings around Melbourne had led me to one of these spaces.
"The Peel Hotel." The sign read.
I knew from the clientele waiting outside it wasn't just a hotel. Calling it a hotel is exactly the kind of coded phraseology gay men invented to covertly communicate homo-social intention that still fell under the linguistic auspices of plausible deniability. With enough practice, we become experts at the double-entendre. I knew exactly what the Peel Hotel was, and I knew it was exactly the type of space I needed to find the human connection I was seeking.
The bar was packed. Young Melburnians danced to hit songs with their friends. The energy was exuberant, as it often is in gay spaces. It was as if people were shedding the layers and layers of armour society forces us to wear. It didn't take long for me to find Ben. He was in the middle of the dancefloor, surrounded by a semi-circle of friends, handsome, and dancing full of energy. We locked eyes. I approached. As he would later retell it, I said hello with a kiss.
As many gay men can attest, there is an unmistakable rush associated with these kinds of physical interactions in gay bars. They often trigger a massive upswell of repressed emotional energy, enough even to counteract the socially conditioned reflexively aversive responses we hold against intimacy. That's not to say that cortisol doesn't swirl thick in these hormonal cocktails. It's just that — for once — love overcomes fear. It's exhilarating. It's intoxicating. And coupled with the boomboomboom of dance music, it's totally addictive.
Ben seemed to be aware of the risks associated with getting carried away in emotion, so he made efforts to ground our interaction.
"These are my friends." He yelled to me over the music, bringing us back to reality.
"It's Rachel's birthday."
"Nice to meet you, Rachel." I yelled, composing myself.
The rest of the night was a blur of drinks, dancing, and new friends. We stayed out late, switched venues multiple times, got meat pies, and cabbed back to his place. Phone numbers were exchanged. I returned home in the early hours of the morning, exhausted, but also exhilarated. I had met someone new. Someone handsome. Someone intriguing. Isolated in Melbourne, far from the forces that brought me here, the opportunity to meaningfully interact with someone had emerged. His name was Ben.
It wasn't long before we saw each other again. The curiosity was mutual. This time though, we'd do something involving daylight. He took me to a Rhododendron garden located on the outskirts of the city. It was the perfect setting to get to know each other. Isolated from the city, we could explore each others' personalities without fear of judgment of others. I learnt that he was kind, patient, funny, and honest. I learnt that he grew up Baptist and that he loved his parents, but they had difficult opinions about homosexuality. I learnt he held deep bonds with his friends, and I learnt that despite earlier challenges, he still maintained a spiritual faith and went to church. This aspect of Ben's personality struck me as the most impressive. I was in awe of his ability to sustain his humanity, as well as the humanity of his detractors, despite growing up in an overtly homophobic context. He hadn't folded into his anger and insecurities, unlike so many other gay men I had met up until that point. Kindness still mattered to Ben, even if only as a possibility. Our day finished with a trip up to the top of Mount Dandenong, a nearby mountain that offers a wide-angle view of Melbourne, including its CBD. It's the type of view that makes you feel bigger than anything that's going on below you.
(3) Ben at Rhododendron garden. (2014). Taken by the author.
From that point onwards Ben became my Melbourne companion. He introduced me to his friends and invited me to house parties, bar nights, and even a weekend in Mornington Peninsula, Melbourne's affluent getaway destination. I even met his step-mom (briefly) when we ran an errand at his parent's house. With each encounter, we got to know each other more and more, and with each positive interaction, we chipped away at the socially conditioned reflexively aversive responses to gay intimacy both of us had learnt throughout our youths. You could say we dated, although both of us knew I had a one-way plane ride home in a couple of months. Perhaps that's exactly what allowed us to be so open with each other. The emotional stakes are lower when an end is pre-registered. I know he felt the same way. It was cathartic for him to open up about his past to another person who was so interested in listening. Some of his stories were heartbreaking. All were resilient. I was beginning to fall in love.
(3) Ben Looking for Kangaroos at Parents House. (2014). Taken by the author.
Love is a highly combustible compound. It is composed of two seemingly incompatible elements. On one end, love is eternal. Love feels like you are connecting with a force that existed before you were born and will continue to exist after you die. When you are in love, you feel like you are connecting with an aspect of human existence that transcends individual differences. Love, in its purest form, remains stable over time and space. Love is eternal. On the other end, love is ephemeral. Love is like a flash of meaning, emerging unexpectedly and out of your control. Like when the clouds suddenly break to let the sunlight in. Love is ephemeral. Adding too much of either of these elements — eternality or ephemerality — contaminates love's purity. Too much eternality and love becomes control. Too much ephemerality and love becomes meaningless. There are certain types of love that are more combustible than others. Gay love, for example, easily combusts in aversive contexts. In my past failed relationship, my amounts were mismeasured, and the context was unsupportive, so the whole concoction exploded on me. I reeled like a mad scientist. It took a whole new context, along with a measured approach, to get the combination right.
The specifics of the rest of my time with Ben in Melbourne are best left private. Suffice it to say that our bond grew over the course of the Australian spring, to the extent that leaving Melbourne was emotionally challenging. But I wasn't about to stay. I couldn't. So I returned to Canada with a heavy heart but also one with more dimension to it. What followed was an identity collapse worse than the one I experienced before I left for Australia. It felt awful to be back in the original context that led to my first failed relationship. Context matters, I concluded. To be isolated from those aversive contexts, then, can be a godsend. What worked for Australia's plants and animals millions of years ago, what worked for the British convicts in the 19th century, worked for me during my visit. It was Australia’s isolation that allowed me to explore my desires without judgment, to test out new ways of being, to embody my emotions, and — without fear — to fall in love completely.
(3) Ben and Author. (2014). Taken by friend.