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If this isn't marriage...
Apr. 14th, 2012 01:50 pmWas rereading an old article about Bob Brown following his unexpected resignation yesterday.
These bits in particular:
Several times he considered killing himself. "I remember walking down Parramatta Road to Sydney University and thinking, 'If I ever get out of this alive I am going to speak up about it,'" Brown says. He moved to London for a few years and talked to a counsellor who suggested that rather than trying to cure himself, he may be better off just accepting that he was gay. He worked through his angst and in 1976 gave an interview, at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Tasmania, to The Examiner in Launceston under the headline Doctor Says He's Gay: "Many young people are going through a great deal of trauma over something for which they are not to blame," Dr Brown told the newspaper.
...
As a 32-year-old doctor in conservative rural Tasmania, way back in 1976, when even Elton John had girlfriends, he publicly declared his homosexuality so others might be spared his "years of misery".
...
Bob Brown and I are on the way to Tasmania's magnificent and scarred Styx Valley in his parliamentary Prius when I mention what [Paul] Thomas had told me. His face lights up. "I didn't think I could love that man any more," he beams. "But, gee, when he said yes to that loan ... well, what more could you want from a partner?"
Luckily for Brown the relationship is a good one, for it was a long time coming. It began, fittingly, with a bushwalk on the eve of the 1996 federal election. Brown was then 52 and Thomas was a campaign worker, 10 years his junior. After much trauma and soul-searching - including submitting himself to aversion therapy, during which he was wired to a machine that delivered electric shocks each time a picture of a nude man was shown in order to cure his "urges" - he had finally accepted he was gay and had come out to his friends and family 25 years earlier. Paul Thomas is his very first boyfriend. "He was a bit of a martyr to the cause," Thomas, 56, says drily. Thomas is from a fifth-generation Tasmanian farming family and says, "In this neck of the woods, telling people that I was having a relationship with Bob Brown was more of an ordeal than telling people I was gay."
Brown tells me that he always thought having a partner would be an impediment to public life - but it was the opposite and it gave him the support he needed to keep going. Paul, says Richard Flanagan, "liberated Brown from his sense of duty".
On the day that I was in Canberra his staff were enthralled by the latest episode of Craig Thomson and the Magic Union Pudding. As Sky News reported the besieged Labor MP's woes, Brown quietly slipped away into his office for 10 minutes. He emerged with an envelope. "My daily missive," he said. It was a letter to Paul. He sends one each day they are apart.
Excuse me, I appear to have something in my eye.
These bits in particular:
Several times he considered killing himself. "I remember walking down Parramatta Road to Sydney University and thinking, 'If I ever get out of this alive I am going to speak up about it,'" Brown says. He moved to London for a few years and talked to a counsellor who suggested that rather than trying to cure himself, he may be better off just accepting that he was gay. He worked through his angst and in 1976 gave an interview, at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Tasmania, to The Examiner in Launceston under the headline Doctor Says He's Gay: "Many young people are going through a great deal of trauma over something for which they are not to blame," Dr Brown told the newspaper.
...
As a 32-year-old doctor in conservative rural Tasmania, way back in 1976, when even Elton John had girlfriends, he publicly declared his homosexuality so others might be spared his "years of misery".
...
Bob Brown and I are on the way to Tasmania's magnificent and scarred Styx Valley in his parliamentary Prius when I mention what [Paul] Thomas had told me. His face lights up. "I didn't think I could love that man any more," he beams. "But, gee, when he said yes to that loan ... well, what more could you want from a partner?"
Luckily for Brown the relationship is a good one, for it was a long time coming. It began, fittingly, with a bushwalk on the eve of the 1996 federal election. Brown was then 52 and Thomas was a campaign worker, 10 years his junior. After much trauma and soul-searching - including submitting himself to aversion therapy, during which he was wired to a machine that delivered electric shocks each time a picture of a nude man was shown in order to cure his "urges" - he had finally accepted he was gay and had come out to his friends and family 25 years earlier. Paul Thomas is his very first boyfriend. "He was a bit of a martyr to the cause," Thomas, 56, says drily. Thomas is from a fifth-generation Tasmanian farming family and says, "In this neck of the woods, telling people that I was having a relationship with Bob Brown was more of an ordeal than telling people I was gay."
Brown tells me that he always thought having a partner would be an impediment to public life - but it was the opposite and it gave him the support he needed to keep going. Paul, says Richard Flanagan, "liberated Brown from his sense of duty".
On the day that I was in Canberra his staff were enthralled by the latest episode of Craig Thomson and the Magic Union Pudding. As Sky News reported the besieged Labor MP's woes, Brown quietly slipped away into his office for 10 minutes. He emerged with an envelope. "My daily missive," he said. It was a letter to Paul. He sends one each day they are apart.
Excuse me, I appear to have something in my eye.
