Gay men’s working lives, retirement and old age

gay men’s working lives,

retirement and old age

GENDERS AND SEXUALITIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

peter robinson

Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences

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Centre for Women’s Studies

University of York, York, UK

Diane Richardson

Sociology

Newcastle University

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Peter Robinson

Gay Men’s Working

Lives, Retirement

and Old Age

Foreword by

Humphrey McQueen

Peter Robinson

Arts, Social Science and Humanities

Swinburne University of Technology

Hawthorn, VIC

Australia

Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences

ISBN 978-1-137-43531-6 ISBN 978-1-137-43532-3 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-43532-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937144

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In memory of Roger Horton

vii

‘Work! Consume! Die!’ remains salutary about the nullities to which life

can be reduced in the absence of fulflling relationships across its every

sphere and at each stage. We become what we do, as individuals and as

a species. If we do nothing, we become nothing. Te fate of Sebastian

in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer (1958) is a metaphor for

idleness relieved by preying on the poor, who eat him.

Peter Robinson’s third instalment from his study of gay males takes

us beyond reported experiences of work and retirement into his refec￾tions and on to those of his interview subjects. As ever, we are left

questioning how to make sense of a universe indiferent to our exist￾ence yet amenable to our needs and hopes through the social efort we

too narrowly call ‘paid work’.

*

Most of us, much of the time, remake ourselves in such jobs where

estrangement and alienation can turn work to a near-life experience.

Allowing for the fact that earning a quid has always been compul￾sory for the 99%, the prime attraction in going to work used to be to

socialise. Te fragmentation of the application of labour since the 1980s

has stripped away much of that enrichment. Finding enough paid work

Foreword

viii Foreword

each week to survive is not going to get any easier in competition with

robotic automation. Moreover, precarious employment all but excludes

the promise of paid work that enriches our individuality through the

quality of our relationships.

Higher rates of joblessness and the fractured future for such work as

will be on ofer are not specifc to any strata of the workforce. However,

in a buyer’s market for labour, the petty prejudices that would otherwise

be inoperative add to the chances of gays being passed over, a discrimi￾nation doubled if the application is both gay and not quite white.

Gay liberation had hardly got underway when the long trough

in unemployment ended in the mid 1970s. Te 1980s saw two more

whacks with the restructuring of work and HIV-AIDS. In a world

where a majority of otherwise sensible people fail to distinguish a cold

from the fu, it is hardly surprising that the facts about the limited

means for transmitting the AIDS virus has still not eradicated the panic

about breathing the same air let alone sharing a toilet seat, as the experi￾ences of the New Zealand teacher testify.

Te discrimination against a HIV+ lawyer depicted in Philadelphia

(1993) was nasty yet Hollywood’s portrayal of his fnal days was more

glamorous than the fate of the tens of thousands of his fellow US citi￾zens who died impoverished in a polity where a halfway decent health

service remains an impossible dream.

*

‘Unemployed at last!’ exalts ‘Tom Collins’, the narrator of Joseph

Furphy’s Such is Life (1903) in one of the most arresting opening lines

in literature. Tom is looking forward to writing up his diaries. Good

luck to him. For most of us, to be out of paid work even for a week

or two means a fnancial crisis. Long-term unemployment causes rela￾tionships to sunder and results in homelessness. Once again, those out￾comes are not extremes. In recent years, millions have been denied their

entitlements because of corporate and state bankruptcies. Te unrav￾elling is far from over, and may even have not begun if the Bank for

International Settlements is right in alleging that the measures taken

by governments since 2008 have done no more than postpone the day

of reckoning while making its impact worse. Nest-eggs might hatch

vulture funds.

Foreword ix

To retire early on a package is not the same as getting the sack

before ending up on a disability pension in one’s 50s. In any society

which thrives on structured inequalities, Sophie Tucker knew of what

she spoke: ‘Ah’s been rich an’ ah’s been poor, and believes me, rich is

best.’ In societies like Australia, the age pension guarantees frugal com￾fort—if one is out of the commercial rental market, does not need to

drip-feed Big Pharma and has no calls for big-ticket outlays, say, for

home repairs. People are now being made to wait till they turn 67, and

encouraged to keep working beyond those years while being told that

you are too old at 40.

Te economic imperatives that exacerbated the insecurities inherent

in working life during the 1980s are reaching into retirement, indeed,

are in pursuit of the money we cannot take with us. Te secular stag￾nation that persists from the implosion of capital expansion late in

2008 impels its agents of capital to seek fresh sectors from which to

garner profts by colonising hitherto sheltered realms, notably educa￾tion, health and aged care. Just as the Mad Men of marketeering learnt

to chase the Pink Dollar, their equivalents in the corporatised service

sector are now buying up retirement homes, a take-over in which the

churches are complicit, selling-out their caritas to the likes of Lend

Lease and Stocklands. Is this oncoming wave of elder abuse designed

to meet the compensation payouts for decades of institutionalised child

abuse? We all now have as much to fear from corporates that are proft￾blind to sexual orientation as from religious Fundamentalists who see

little else.

Te business plans vary according to the targeted facility. For one

very expensive ex-Anglican property, the aim is capital gain from ren￾ovating the unit after its current owner’s departure. At an ex-Roman

one intended for welfare tenants, the scheme is to replace its blocks of

motel-type rooms with spaces reminiscent of Japanese capsule hotels,

while dispensing with the trained staf who dispense the medications.

Te luxurious and the slack will be promoted as providing fexibility

and freedom of choice, two of the Big Lies behind which corporates

retain their sovereignty over us as consumers.

x Foreword

An alternative of modest guesthouses is hinted at by the interviewee

who plans to take in a couple of boarders to make his own ends meet.

Why not a B&B element to vitalise the talk at the shared breakfast

table? Single men used to wash up in inner-city boarding houses until

gentrifers knocked down those cheap and cheerless refuges. Today’s bad

used to be a lot worse, and still is across most of the world, and will not

improve anywhere without campaigns to match those around securing

decent responses to HIV-AIDS.

In keeping with the American way of death, US frms bought up

municipal cemeteries around the world, pushed up the price of burial

sites and cold-called families to shame them into spending thousands

on graves in need of ‘renovation’. We can escape their clutches by

bequeathing our cadavers to anatomy schools. Being old does not make

all our bits obsolete and so it is worth bequeathing any still functioning

parts for transplant.

*

Several decades ago, Dennis Altman surprised an academic seminar that

he had come to understand more about himself from novels than from

the social sciences. Since no one was interviewing gay men about their

lives—other than Hirshfeld and the Kinseys into sexual practices—crea￾tive writings, and responses to them, call for sensitive rereadings, not

grubbing for data but seeking what Raymond Williams calls ‘structures

of feeling’, for a start, to appreciate which kinds of work were deemed

appropriate for homosexual men.

Vautrin is Balzac’s master criminal and anything but the fop,

although his mastery of disguise could doubtless have extended to

full drag had a crime demanded it. Patrick White’s Te Twyborn Afair

(1975) portrays its protagonist as a jackeroo in the Snowy Mountains.

His character was inspired by the oil portrait of Herbert Dyce-Murphy,

a trannie espionage agent, one of the kinds of work that earned queers a

bad name as traitors.

Fiction can take us into tabooed territories, though their frontiers are

as permeable as presumptions about what queers should do for a living.

Stereotypical occupations of hairdressing and ballet-dancers provided a

cover for gay soldiers and scafolders, one which the coming out of foot￾ballers and Olympic Gold Medallists has removed so that anyone can

Foreword xi

now be ‘sus’, but none more so than men of any persuasion who work

with young children. In the backwash from the exposure of the institu￾tional cover-ups of abuse in schools and orphanages, students are aware

of their power to accuse. Tese interfows between reform and fresh

forms of repression remind us that there are few gains without some

losses.

Lillian Hellman’s play, Te Children’s Hour (1931), and the 2012

Te Hunt traverse the disasters from children falsely accusing teachers

of deviance or molestation. Steve J. Spears’s internationally renowned

play, Te Elocution of Benjamin Franklin (1975), about a sexually

aware pubescent boy and his besotted speech instructor, went where

few would now dare to tread, even though nothing happens. Far more

circumspect is Kenneth Mackenzie’s Te Young Desire It (1937) about

the friendship between a repressed teacher and a straight 15-year-old

student.

George Turner’s career as Commonwealth Employment Ofcer in

the large Victorian city of Wangaratta in the 1950s provided the mate￾rials for his close observation of blokey behaviour. His Waste of Shame

(1965) explores the alcohol-fuelled violence between the homosocial

and the homophobic in a rural sawmill. Alcoholism just one of the

addictions not touched on by the interviewees as a means to cope with

workplace stress or the loss of structure in retirement.

*

To conclude with a scatter of responses to some of what’s not obvious

from the interviews.

Since we seem never to fnd the time to do in retirement half the

things that we imagined we would, it is superfuous to think up what

else gay men might do. Te frequent references to volunteering around

AIDS suggest opportunities to extend a gay Meals on Wheels beyond to

those with HIV-AIDS. Tere is a gay LifeLine, so why not a service to

draw up living wills?

No one talks about being part of a ‘Men’s shed’.

Tere is only one very passing suggestion about voluntary euthanasia

despite overwhelming public support for its legalisation in some form.

More is involved here than release from physical torments. A decision

xii Foreword

to go while the going is good is not a disease in need of medication and

therapy.

To knowing what music the interview subjects would choose for their

memorial services does more than ‘round out’ our assessment of their

other answers. Tere is no mention of an afterlife—or reincarnation—

and none of cryogenics, that ultimate vanity of vanities. Tose silences

should not lead us to assume that all the respondents are atheists for it

seems as likely that those who do retain a shy hope of a life everlasting

have been secularised in how they speak about the lives they lead on

earth. Perhaps that loss explains the emotional roller-coaster of how we

do nowadays react to the deaths of those closest to us, as portrayed in

Tony Ayres’s 2002 feature, Walking on Water.

Te moment of death is not mentioned. Fear of dying has displaced

the fear of no longer existing. An acquaintance who bought a unit

facing Moreton Bay dealt with his being woken early by an enlarged

prostate by slipping across the street to sit on a park bench and enjoy

the sunrise. Regular joggers exchanged greetings with him until one

morning he could no longer respond. Tat exit might not be perfec￾tion but it was much, much better than most of us can expect. Sherwin

Nuland’s How We Die (1993) dispelled most of my fears about how the

end would overtake me by spelling out that few of us will die of this or

that disease, since dying, not unlike living, is a process but one in which

each aficted body part disrupts others until the system shuts down.

Nuland is not a cheery read but a reassuring one in ways that total igno￾rance cannot maintain when our time comes.

Te loss of heavenly rewards has not abolished the fear of hell on

earth, manifest in the concern at ending up a prisoner in a homopho￾bic institution. Tose who want a quiet life might revert to passing as

straight. Why does none of the activists embrace the chance to carry

the message of liberation to a new audience? Te fear that the ‘Out’

hairdresser as stereotype would be in for a rough time from the fellow

occupants has to be set against how elderly women will have had long

relationships with their own gay hairdressers, and how much they will

welcome the proximity of someone to provide the tactile pleasure of a

warm mauve rinse for a lot less than the going rate down the road.

Foreword xiii

As I key in these words in my own unit at the top of 64 steps, I can

still aford to sound fussy about where I might end up. Without allocat￾ing each fear to a circle of hell, the frst that comes to mind is where the

pinnacle of intellectual activity is bingo night and the communal tel￾evision is fxed to a shopping channel. Te thought of an all-gay retire￾ment village is not without its own terrors. Being at the mercies of bossy

queans jostles the despair at being condemned to the company of peo￾ple who think Puccini the world’s greatest composer.

*

After an 88-year-old woman friend haunted an exhibition of Yves

Klein’s blue canvases she said: ‘Te older I get, the more I value silence.’

At the same time, she sought out new or rare operas: ‘I don’t have time

left for what I already know.’ Between serenity and impatience seems as

good a spot as any to close these remarks and to end one’s days.

Canberra, Australia

December 2016

Humphrey McQueen

xv

At the Alfred Hospital, Caulfeld, I thank Ms. Sally Costar for her

support and the warmth and humour she brought to our many cof￾fee morning meetings in Balaclava and the work we did together with

Alfred Health, Melbourne while I wrote this book. As well, I thank a

former colleague from RMIT University, Dr. Helen Marshall, for the

keen eye she brought to proofreading the manuscript and her injunc￾tions to fnd the energy to put more time into undeveloped ideas which

if left to my own devices I would most likely have left for another time.

At Swinburne University of Technology, I thank Prof. Linda

Briskman, Prof. Brian Costar, Dr. Scott Ewing, and Dr. Julie Kimber

for their friendship and encouragement while I worked on this book

and its predecessor. It is rare nowadays to fnd friendship in academia,

so competitive has it become, but these four colleagues gave it with￾out hesitation and I am grateful for its sustaining infuence during lean

times. I would like also to acknowledge here the kindness of our Dean

of Arts, Social Science and Humanities, Prof. Robbie Robertson and the

Dean of Health, Prof. Janet Hiller, both of whom were encouraging and

egalitarian in their relations with me.

Acknowledgements

xvi Acknowledgements

Tanks also to my undergraduate students, among whom were

Mr. Joe Jackson, Ms. Rachel Maguire, Mr. Nick Pelley, and Mr. Zac Rhode

and my postgraduate student, Mr. Sam Teague. All heard about the tra￾vails of the research/teaching academic in the modern-day university and

were kind enough to give honest feedback whenever I read them excerpts

from the chapter I was wrestling with.

I was grateful for receiving a number of strategic research grants from

the Department of Social Sciences at Swinburne, which helped with lit￾erature reviews for some of the areas covered in this book. I was grateful

also to Mr. Sam Teague, whose Ph.D. research I was supervising at the

time of writing this book, for his help as my occasional research assis￾tant and sometime marking assistant. And to Prof. Michael Leach, my

boss for his frank and thoughtful advice along the way.

At Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, I was very fortunate in having

Dr. Philippa Grand as editor for this and my two previous books. She

gave me good, clear advice and was ever supportive. I was fortunate also

in having Roger Horton as friend and colleague—to whose memory

I have dedicated this book—who helped bring the manuscript of my

frst book to the attention of the then commissioning editor at Palgrave

Macmillan, Ms. Melanie Blair, and who introduced me to the work of

W.G. Sebald. Roger took his own life in 2013 and I have included in

the Appendices an article he wrote of his time in the Australian army

where in my view he was brutalised. While it speaks for itself, it will also

give readers some idea of the long-term efect of institutional racism

and homophobia, underlining similar accounts of interviewees which

can be found in Chaps. 2–4. For her assistance with this book, I thank

Ms. Beth Farrow at Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Finally, I thank Humphrey McQueen for agreeing to write the

Foreword to this book and his interest in and encouragement of my

research interests and writing ambitions over more than 30 years. It was

he who frst introduced me to the idea of the ‘world of work’ and I hope

I have shown some understanding here of how three generations of gay

men engaged with it over the course of their working lives and how it

shaped them.