Rare and illuminating

Rare and full of light

The day of Ian Thorpe’s ‘big reveal’ interview, in fact only a few hours beforehand, I went off to do what has become one of the highlights of my week. Sometimes I do it for hours, even whole days: in short, I take myself off on Sunday drives. Yes, I’ve reached that point in my life. Thankfully I don’t take with me ELO or Mariah Carey CDs, but albums by Sonic Youth or Red House Painters or Burial or Jon Hopkins. Last Sunday, however, I didn’t have time for a whole day’s adventure, just a quick drive to the edge of town. Because the drive is only partly the point, as is the listening of music; I actually go on the hunt for old shit. Not posh antiques so much, but bits and pieces that might look good in a crumbling 120-year-old house owned by a writer who too is falling apart.

Last Sunday’s trip could only be short because I’d spent much of the day preparing financial records for my accountant. Getting my tax together is officially the nadir of my year. It is a time of great, fathomless despair. So, after six hours of that, it was time to jump in the car and head out to my local purveyor of old stuff. The business is in what clearly used to be a corner-shop. It’s filled with good things from years forgotten (by most), but none of it is expensive, and very little of it is in perfect condition – excellent. The shop is neat, but it’s not the sort of place where you feel you should put on a pair of white gloves before checking the price-tag. It’s owned by a friendly middle-aged man called Mart. A Sunday not long ago he offered me one of the Tim Tams on his plate. During the week he drives a school bus to towns and villages further out; it’s an appropriate occupation because I can easily imagine him to have been the sort of cheerful, chatty kid that no one had a reason to dislike.

As always, as soon as I stepped inside the shop, Mart said g’day – literally – and commented on the weather. ‘A big frost this morning, eh mate, minus-seven, they reckoned, with a feels-like temp of minus-ten. Winter’s really hit, eh mate!’ I could only agree. Before my eye was immediately taken by a light-fitting from the very early 1900s. I’d been on the hunt for exactly it for years. I checked it over: not only was it appropriate, it was highly affordable. I asked him to get it down from its display. I checked it over one last time, before I said that I’d buy the thing.

At the counter, which is a low desk with an old brass sign cheekily declaring ‘OFFICE CLERK’, Mart began packing the fitting into a box and started writing out a receipt. Wanting to hold up my end of the conversational bargain, I told Mart that for at least a couple of years I’d been driving all over the district looking for a light-fitting like the one he was selling me. I told him about the shop I go to in a small town an hour’s drive way that specialises in antique lights and lamps. He said, ‘Oh yes, the joint owned by Andrew and…’ and immediately went back to finishing the wrapping of my purchase before getting to work on the EFTPOS machine.

But I got the drift.

The lights-and-lamps shop an hour’s drive away is owned and operated by a gay man. Mart obviously knows him and his partner; being the gregarious, welcoming, non-judgemental person that he’s always displayed himself to be, he’s probably on very good, friendly terms with his regional antique-trade colleagues.

Being fond of black jeans and hoodies and Blundstone boots that have seen much better days, and often having paint or chook-crap stuck on me somewhere, and a three-day growth, I may not present as the typical (whatever that is, Christ) same-sex-attracted bloke. But neither would I present as someone with limited views on these things. Still, for Mart, it was easier to not make it clear that the light-and-lamp specialists were gay men. It was easier just not to say. Who knows: to him I might have extreme views. So, yes, best not to say, best not to say. That’s not to charge my mate Mart with homophobia. It was just easier.

Until people like me and Mart can be open and honest about the relationships of the people around us, even Australian heroes will have to go through the painful, anxious, almost debilitating act of shedding one skin to reveal another. Which is why, despite all the media-people build-up, the strategic commerce, the close-to-scripted event of it all, what Ian Thorpe did last Sunday night was necessary, important, valuable, and gigantically illuminating.

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