Fighting not Dancing :: Scott Harrower

Fighting not Dancing has been made possible by insurmountable occurrences that have shaped me and my need to challenge injustices inflicted on Others. To those events; I speak out. My gratitude to Lismore Regional Gallery staff who have supported this work being made public.

My sincere thanks to the actors who joined the fight with me; your patience and enthusiasm have made this all possible. In no particular order; Victer Ulrich, Glen Mackay, Jeremy Medina-Allum, Dr John Rule, Cameron Duggin, Aaron Urquhart, Greg White, Matt Hogan, Mac McMahon, Chris Harris, Carlo De Angelis, Jim Sinclair, David Sattler, Kalani Tardrew-O’Meara, Dean Grant, Greg Lynn, Barrie Harrison, Basil Cameron, Alex Salvat.

Ron Nahass, thank you for accepting the challenge of working with me. Your music enlivens the spirit of resistance that began at the Stonewall Inn; to you and your Ensemble, I am indebted to your talents; Kyle Walker, Ben Solis, Darcy Leon, Kevin Virgilio, Andrew Berman, Alvaro Rodas, Paul Robertson, Andrew Holland, Hubert Chen, Jonathan Bloomfield, Ben Espinosa, Adam Van Housen, Marvin Li, William Deion, Bjorn Berkout, Adrienne Lloyd and voice-over

by Mat Lydon.

Dr Pól-Miles McCann your written words speak an insightful truth and mindful recognition. Thank you for your essay.

My irreplaceable seamstress, Rita Tarraran; let’s make costumes together again. You never dropped a stitch, while I unpicked mine. Dr Fiona Foley, thank you for the guidance. I heard every word you said.

Finally, I would like to thank my Mother and Father, for never turning their back on me; my pink family and friends for your constant support, I offer you my respect; and dedicate this work to all the LGBTIQ folk, past and present who have given of themselves to fight for our equality.

Scott Harrower BCA

MUSIC: G’day Cpt. Moonlite, composer: Ronald Nahass (musician, teacher); commissioned by Scott Harrower.

IMAGES: front cover: You are Nothing but a Social Menace, 1951 (detail) inside left to right: Adjudicator’s Glee and Fairground Attraction above: A Lover’s Grief, Port Arthur, 1846 All images courtesy the artist exhibition dates: 18 May – 30 June 2019, Lismore Regional Gallery Images and text are copyright of the artist, the writer, and Lismore Regional Gallery. All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, duplicating or otherwise without the permission of the copyright owners.

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FIGHTING NOT DANCING SCOTT HARROWER

FIGHTING NOT DANCING SCOTT HARROWER The world is a complex environment. Every day we move through our physical and social spheres awash with information of which we are barely aware – it surrounds us ubiquitously. Somehow we manage to subconsciously absorb and process millions of pieces of information in order to function. Our brains create shortcuts so we recognise patterns in this chaos of data: We could not function if we had to understand every nuance of every input afresh, so we curate mental shortcuts and memories to sort this into cohesion. We don’t need to understand the differences between a Great Dane and a Pug to know they are both dogs. Symbols convey meanings.

Unlike most organisms, humans communicate linguistically, and this shapes our understanding of our place in the world. We do this mostly without conscious thought – in the same way that we ascribe meanings to symbols, we ascribe meaning to commonly understood words which carry significant cognitive and emotional meanings. Without this shared understanding we would just be barking random vowels and consonants at each other. Our shared acceptance of these meanings is what gives language its power. A word, once created, carries meaning and power across time and distance.

The word ‘homosexual’ did not exist before 1868 when it was coined by Hungarian journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny. Obviously this doesn’t mean that there was no homosexual behaviour going on for all of history before that moment. But there was no single word which categorised people as such. There had been what were considered abhorrent activities, and men who participated in them. But there was no descriptive term which described men as being homosexual until that time. If sodomy was an activity, when a man engaged in it he was a sodomite – but what was he when he wasn’t doing it? He was just a man. (George Chauncey’s history of sex in New York brilliantly describes sex in this period: before the term was adopted and understood more broadly, there were just men and fairies. A man could be married, perhaps have a mistress, but also receive oral sex from a fairy at the wharves. As long as he was not penetrated, did not kiss or show affection, his status as a man was not questioned. He might not admit to this with his wife or his mistress and this was a world where the category of the homosexual did not exist. While his activity may not have been open for discussion, in his mind his status as a man was not questioned. He maintained his masculine role while the fairy – in words of Australian sociologist, David Plummer – the ‘failed male’ – lost his by being penetrated.)

The practical impact of Kertbeny’s creation of the category ‘homosexual’ was huge and often devastating. Once the concept was named it created a category into which

surrounds the spectator with a melancholic sense of injustice and an embolden fear of imminent danger.

Seeing and hearing a captured moment takes us into the world of the subject; a world where we may never have been or imagined. Understandings of the Vietnam War pivoted with an iconic photograph – a naked, terrified girl running while her skin burns from napalm – and battle footage thrust into Western homes every night on the news. Photography forced the terror of war into middle-America and middle-Australia and support for the war plummeted.

people could be placed. In Michel Foucault’s famous dictum, ‘the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a ‘species’. A category appeared that could be used to pigeon-hole, to hold, to control. Once you were labelled a homosexual you took on those characteristics and those characteristics, generally despised, were ascribed by whoever ‘owned’ the category. The Church? Homosexuality was a sin.

The judiciary? A crime. Psychiatry? A mental illness.

Psychoanalysis? The product of an absent father or domineering mother. And each of these wielders of power created their own cauldrons of punishment, from damnation and whippings, imprisonment and exile, psych wards, chemical castration and aversion therapy.

(Put religion and therapy together and you still find conversion ‘therapy’ practiced in Australia today…)

Foucault, the French sociologist/philosophe/historian, used the term ‘discourse’ to describe how we come to understand a concept by the language we used to describe and therefore categorise it. For the ‘homosexual’ the discourses of sin were replaced by the discourses of criminal behaviour as the Church lost authority to the courts, who then acquiesced to the psychiatrists and their discourse of mental illness.

Following the civil rights and feminist movements of the mid-late 20th century, gay rights activists began to adopt the techniques of those movements (peaceful protest, visibility) and their discourses (human rights, justice). Eventually legislative change began to impact the West in terms of decriminalising homosexuality – although with the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, and the spectre of sexuality being linked to contagion and death, the progression to social justice faced resurgent moral and political resistance, and an unprecedented wave of violence and murder. The New South Wales police service estimates that there are around 90 gay hate murders from the mid-1980s to the turn of the millennium. Scott Harrower’s The Adjudicator’s Glee shows both the energy of violence between men and the spectacle that this can provide the public. Which of these men is horrified by the violence and who is aroused? A fighter wears an executioner’s hood. Initially a prosaic garment to give privacy to the government official who would take another’s life, here it takes on a fetishistic quality. It connects early capital punishment with an internalised homophobia and calls forward to the BDSM sexualisation of such male-directed violence.

Blood sport, tattoos and a blue singlet – signifiers of working class machismo – are watched over by the dispassionate gaze of the bow-tied official. Violence is not far from the surface, between men, in our history.

Since the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as discourses of human rights have emerged, it has become harder for those opposed to homosexuality to argue against a human rights argument. This change has significantly altered policy and public perceptions in the West but less so in Eastern Europe, Asia, the Muslim world or most of Africa – both the Christian and Muslim majority

countries. In the week of writing this introduction Brunei has re-introduced death by stoning for homosexuality.

We do not solely mediate the world by language although is it the main method through which people communicate. We ascribe significant meaning to visual symbols. Some of this is in-built, hard-wired in our DNA through evolution. A dog wagging its tail is recognised as friendly by other dogs – and humans. All cultures recognise facial expressions which mean anger or joy.

Some of it is specific to cultures – in Asia white indicates the unknown and unseen so it is the colour of death. In the West it means purity, virginity – and the colour of brides.

Where does this leave gay Australia if representations of us – particularly symbols of us relating to each other – are absent?

Hearing, seeing and reading about our histories is how we make sense of our place in the world. History is not just created in the moment in which it occurs, but is written about after it happens. A photograph captures a moment, but it is in the subsequent sharing after the event that it comes to telegraph its meaning. (Before the photographic era, a painting would be a composed, stylised representation of an event.) History is written by the victors – and until the 20th century it was only visually represented in the ways that the most powerful would allow.

Cinema re-creates allowable versions of history and the present to the extent that we come to understand the world through a cinematic representation. The hero gets the girl – and this is a discourse that Foucault would recognise in terms of ‘acceptable’ masculinity. If there is no variation to this script it becomes a key way we in which learn male and female roles, and how the relationships between them must be. Seeing this over and over again has the effect of imprinting it in our consciousness, which Foucault described as ‘the sedimentation in the body of an infinitely repeated discourse’. You hear the story enough, you see the images enough, it becomes the only way to understand masculinity.

Our mostly-Hollywood mediated cinema presents a world where queer did not exist for most of the 20th century; when other sexualities were shown they were so heavily coded that you had to be in the know to recognise them.

They were presented as fey sidekicks, pitiable creatures, sexless freaks or psychopaths against which the straight leading man could perform his masculinity. Vito Russo’s ‘The Celluloid Closet’ describes these absences and stock characters, and in the documentary follow up, playwright and actor, Harvey Fierstein spoke of how he would hang out for those coded men – the nelly queens, the comic relief – who would at least show him some reflection of who he was. And yet it was a shallow representation, a poor facsimile of gay life for most of the audience. Devoid of sex, affection and masculinity.

You hear the story enough; you see the images enough…

The AIDS crisis forced a re-evaluation, as gay lost its invisibility and could no longer not be discussed. The new trope which developed was the brave yet ultimately tragic man succumbing to the virus. Representations of ‘gay’ were still sequestered in frameworks which did not necessarily represent the daily lives of most gay men. Once again, it was a poor facsimile of gay life for most of its audience. Absence of representation matters. We understand how we can be through the language we use and how that is used around us. We understand who we are by seeing people we can relate to; Harrower’s Fairground Attraction is testament to this.

If there are no role models, who do we become? Ask a Greek Australian how it felt to see Mary Kostakidis the first time she read the SBS news. Representation is the acknowledgement by the country that your people are part of the whole country and Harrower’s research-led practice investigates both personal and historical stories that have been denied and forgotten, giving voice and image to people often absent from our official history.

Scott Harrower’s work is not just about representing minorities. It is about the power of the image in telling a story. In Fighting not Dancing, his imagery is supported by the powerful and evocative cinematic score by New York Composer Ron Nahass; whose orchestration

We understand the world through language. And with a huge emotional impact through imagery. In Harrower’s You are Nothing but a Social Menace, 1951 the visible violence on display – blackened eye and blood coursing from the nose of a bashed man – is underscored by the history of socially sanctioned violence enacted against gay men. The Roman Catholic NSW Superintendent of Police in the 1950s, Colin Delaney, strengthened sections of the Crimes Act that related to homosexual offence and made anti-gay violence a technique of social control by both police and the public who now felt social sanction to attack a man who showed sexual interest in another man. These were common events wherein social disgust at a sexual minority was performed with fists and boots. The real men performed to preserve the fragile sanctity of masculinity and uphold a rigid code of acceptable male behaviour. Australia’s seminal moment of the gay rights movement - the Mardi Gras - was initially a theatre of police violence which left people bashed and broken, emotionally and physically. From the 1950s to the 70s, little changed. In the above AIDS-crisis gay hate murders and the inactions of the police actively hampered investigations. There is strong evidence that some of the bashings (not necessarily the murders) of this period were instigated by groups of police. In 2018, Police Commissioner Mick Fuller apologised for the Mardi Gras assaults. The majority of the later bashings and murders remain unsolved.

Scott Harrower’s exhibition crosses the boundaries of painting and photography. The images are at once as composed as a painting yet captured in the instant of light on a sensor. They have the immediacy of sports reportage – the spray of blood from a boxer’s mouth – but when re-created in the artist’s mind and generated collaboratively with the actors who portray Australian masculinity of the past they show this absent history with a re-constructed authenticity bathed in oil painting grandeur and cinematic excitement.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has records of the number of people arriving in Australia from 1788, but only by gender from 1796 when women made up 27% of the population. The percentage of women fluctuated, growing to 36% in 1812 before gradually dropping to its lowest point of 23% between 1824 and 1828. After this, that figure increased slowly, eventually reaching genderparity in 1916 when many young men left to serve in World War I and never returned. The proportions of men and

women has been stable since that point. But it would be a blinkered historian who might believe that, with men outnumbering women three to one for decades, and in a culture where men lived and socialised remotely often absent of female company for months at a time, that there were no relationships. Harrower’s A Lover’s Grief, Port Arthur, 1846 details a male convict who has just read a letter from his male lover: a man who had been sent for execution in 1846. The letter was published in the Launceston Examiner with the accompanying text: “Shall Tasman’s Isle `so famed, so lovely and so fair, from other nations be estranged, the Name of Sodom bear?’” Activist Rodney Croome saw the publication of this personal tragedy as a way of discrediting the penal system and same-sex relationships. Ironically, this attempt to shame has in effect created a rare documentary example of a penal-era relationship. This indicates that other encounters occurred: some brief, some purely opportunistic sexual release in the absence of women, some romantic. Some were coerced or violent, others being covert love stories going on for years. While the ABS would go on to count marriages, it missed affairs of all sexualities, covert couplings – and any tryst where, if discovered, would have had serious negative impacts on those involved. Harrower’s artwork is not a fanciful imagining which shoehorn a queer history into our collective history. They are drawn from those rare documents which note same sex life early in our history.

But within the daily life in the Outback, in towns and cities, men met with men (and women with women) away from the punitive gaze of the church, judiciary and the medical fraternity. Fragments of these lives exist in court papers, in medical records – and more optimistically in diaries and family oral histories of unmarried uncles and their companions with whom they were close. Coded stories and whispered family secrets. Letters bundled together with either explicit statements of love, or written in a secret language where an expression of friendship or longing for the return of a friend can be understood as ardor; a photo of a relative with a male companion, a soldier with his best mate.

Few documented stories exist but this does not mean that the relationships did not exist. Fewer still images can be found. But if they were taken, then the daily images of men going about their lives with other men, may have looked something like Harrower’s representations.

Dr Pól Miles-McCann BA (Hons), MCounsPsych, PhD Dr Pól Miles-McCann is a psychotherapist and sociologist who has published on the roles of sport, violence and humour in Australian masculinity. His doctoral thesis examined the social and emotional impact that homophobia has on heterosexual men by policing their behaviour and emotional lives. He is a Senior Lecturer in culture and research methodologies at The Australian College of Applied Psychology.