Humanist Blog – Page 2 – Writing about the human experience

“I came home to die.” Folklore and Forgetting.

To commemorate World Day of Folklore (22 August).

In 1949, author Joseph Campbell wrote “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, which explored in part: “specific details about the continuing importance of mythic stories in current times, the energies that support such, and how the body of myths and stories can become corrupted, undernourished, assaulted, even destroyed — and yet return again and again in fresh and unusual ways.” (Estes, 2004, p. xxvi). This generational cycle of life, death and new birth is not just biological – it is cultural. Our heroes and villains are reborn or rebooted every generation. This constitutes a large part of our folklore.

What is Folklore? Harvard University tells us:

“Narrowly, the term “folklore” has been traditionally considered the oral tales of a society. More broadly, the term refers to all aspects of a culture – beliefs, traditions, norms, behaviors, language, literature, jokes, music, art, foodways, tools, objects, etc.”

Every culture and every community has its own folklore – from religious ideologies to national cultures; from populist Hollywood storytelling to minority cohorts (for whom folklore is particularly important to provide collective identity and community cohesion). Folklore can not only mirror a culture, but it relies upon its cultural background to fully explain its own context: “the folklore of a people can be fully understood only through a thorough knowledge of their culture” (Bascom, 1954, p. 338). Folklore bridges generations, fuels ritual, inspires literature and art, and – in recent decades – has flavoured and influenced television, film, urban mythology, and social media memes.

In The Beginning

In 1918 in Oakland, warnings to wear a mask.
Photo: public domain, Source: FoundSF.org

“However, as bad as things were, the worst was yet to come, for germs would kill more people than bullets. By the time that last fever broke and the last quarantine sign came down, the world had lost 3-5% of its population.” ― Charles River Editors, The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic: The History and Legacy of the World’s Deadliest Influenza Outbreak, 2014.

Folklore has provided a basis for many origins – whether the origin and life cycle of the world, or the ironic origin and death cycle of plague; from the Plague of Justinian (which may have caused the fall of the Roman Empire) to our most recent epidemic to impact the whole world (COVID), stories and cultural traditions thrive. Diane Goldstein explores one example of such origin stories:

“A significant part of AIDS legendary tradition betrays our obsession with origins. Whether the narratives focus on government conspiracies, African or Haitian AIDS, “patient zero” type characters, superbugs transmitting the virus through bites, or hundred-year-old AIDS cases, the concern is the same: establishing a first — a source for this thing that made our world change so irreversibly” (Goldstein, 2004, p. 77).

In seeking to address origins – of nations, of religions, of communities, or of our sporting rituals – folklore provides a secular outlet for the religious impulse. Our folkloric responses and rationalisations for plague (and other natural disasters) is perhaps among the most basic, primal versions of this impulse. Vampires and werewolves are attributed to folklore arising from cholera, rabies, and other diseases. The so-called “Spanish Flu” epidemic of 1914 – 1918 was not Spanish and its victims were not (despite recent COVID-inspired vaccine denialism) victims of poorly administered vaccines. Another, more unexpected example is provided by David Keys, who suggests that the Bubonic Plague may have contributed a macabre background to the stories of King Arthur:

“Contrary to all received wisdom, the sixth-century plague catastrophe may indeed have been preserved in the oral tradition and in literature which, centuries later, acted as source material for particular aspects of the medieval Arthurian romances – especially those associated with the quest for the Holy Grail” (Keys, 1999, p. 158).

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

Keys points out that the supposed life and death of King Arthur in the sixth century was contemporaneous with the time of famine and depopulation associated with the arrival of Plague and climatic change. The subsequent Arthurian legends and much of their associated medieval literature refer to the so-called “Waste Lands”, a concept of landscapes and society ravaged by war, pestilence, famine or plague (Keys, pp. 158 – 165). It could be conjectured that the medieval King Arthur stories may have grown from earlier memories of the plague times and the need for society to find a hero and a hope during times of devastation.

One lesson which might be inferred from this Arthurian legacy is that the full effect of modern plagues – such as AIDS and COVID – are yet to be determined and included within our own communal folklore. Perhaps we are yet to find our modern heroic Arthur – or maybe we have simply to recognise that we have already birthed many such heroes amidst their modern sufferings.

Image by Brigitte Vanlerberghe from Pixabay

Common Problems for Common Humanity

“This was a very terrible and melancholy thing to see, and as it was a sight which I could not but look on from morning to night (for indeed there was nothing else of moment to be seen), it filled me with very serious thoughts of the misery that was coming upon the city, and the unhappy condition of those that would be left in it.”
– Daniel Defoe, “A Journal of the Plague Year”, 1666.

In the nineteenth century, author Henry Murger’s novel, “Scènes de la Vie Bohème” (1851) inspired the 1890s Puccini opera, “La Bohème” and both productions included characters who were living and/or dying of consumption (tuberculosis). A century later, US playwright Billy Aaronson came up with a concept to update this material. The idea was developed into the Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway musical, “Rent”, by musical composer Jonathan Larson. Aaronson and Larson agreed that instead of tuberculosis, their afflicted characters would have AIDS (Evelyn McDonnell with Kathy Silberger, 1997, pp. 18 – 21). Thus we see popular art being used to change public understandings and perceptions of two epidemics: TB and AIDS.

Following World War Two, Nobel laureate Albert Camus wrote his story “The Plague” in 1947. His tale concerns a visitation of the Bubonic Plague to a French village of Oran in the 1940s, resulting in a quarantining of the town. This tale is seen as a largely allegorical retelling of the Nazi invasion of France during World War 2. Thus was Camus able to make statements without arousing political or partisan contention.(Tony Judt, Introduction, in Albert Camus (translated by Robin Buss), “The Plague”, Penguin Books, 1947 (2001), p. viii.) His tale remains one of universal truths regarding the nature of isolation, suffering and malevolence:

“From that point on, it could be said that the plague became the affair of us all.”
(Camus, 1947, p. 53).

Historic folkloric links united all people behind the common foe of plague; in recent times we have seen that change. Australia’s early cultural responses to AIDS are an example of this: after reference to the medieval imagery and fear of the Grim Reaper, Australian television (the genuine mass media of the era) was uncertain how to approach a problem that mingled sex, plague, homosexuality and death. Efforts included deferring the problem away from homosexuality, and generally ignoring it altogether. But early fictional approaches on Australian television demonstrated patchwork attempts to address it as a social issue.

The Flying Doctors

“I came home to die. But home isn’t there any more.”
– Les Foster, fictional character dying of AIDS in “The Flying Doctors” (written by Morphett, 1986).

From Skippy and Bellbird on 1960s television; from Boney and Matlock Police to Against the Wind in the 1970s; with films ranging from Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Getting of Wisdom in the 1970s to Crocodile Dundee in the 1980s; Australians appeared to have a love affair with rural lifestyles. Into this tradition came the TV series, The Flying Doctors, fictitiously based upon the real-life organisation, the Royal Flying Doctors’ Service, in the equally fictitious outback town of Cooper’s Crossing (and which is NOT to be confused with the more recent RFDS. which was launched in 2021). After beginning as a 1985 mini-series of three episodes (Zuk, 1998a), The Flying Doctors returned between 1986 and 1991 for a successful run of 221 episodes (Zuk, 1998b). In 1986, during the series’ first year of regular telecast, the episode entitled “Return of the Hero” featured a gay character.

Given that gay characters were quite rare on Australian television at that time, and notwithstanding that this token gay character appeared for only one episode and was dead before the episode ended; his appearance nevertheless marked a courageous stand taken by writer Tony Morphett and all the others who were involved in the episode’s creation. Getting a prominent Australian actor like Gerard Kennedy to play the gay character was also a bit of a coup for Aussie TV at the time.

In the story, a local old boy, Les Foster, returns to Cooper’s Crossing after many years of living in Sydney with his “business partner”, Johnnie. Les is clearly sick but reluctant to reveal the details of his condition to his brother or the other townsfolk. However, he does disclose to Dr. Chris Randall that he is suffering from Kaposi’s sarcoma and AIDS, and that he has come back to Cooper’s Crossing to die.

Encouraged by Dr. Randall, Les “comes out” as gay to his brother Ted, who doesn’t want to know – he prefers to think of his brother as a local war hero. Les dismisses Ted’s hero worship and states that his wartime experience was a very small part of his life. He wants Ted instead to acknowledge and love his whole life. This is a pivotal scene which perhaps could be seen as a metaphor for the battle facing everyone with HIV/AIDS – rather than society making it a “big deal”, their medical condition constitutes only a small fraction of their total life experience and it reflects little upon their actual personality.

In the meantime, the medicos of Cooper’s Crossing discuss Les’ HIV/AIDS status amongst themselves –a breach of Les’ privacy which, in the context of its times, was seen as acceptable and “responsible”. This culminates in a nurse refusing to admit Les to the hospital and telling his friends that he has AIDS. Such breaches of medical ethics regarding people with AIDS were not unheard of in the 1980s.

Following this public exposure, the townsfolk clearly have trouble accepting that Les is a “poofter” and this adds to their fear and stigma. The men folk refuse to drink from glasses at the pub because they fear contagion from the glasses in the dishwasher; and poofter bashers attack Johnnie (with an explicit comparison being made between homophobia and racism). Shortly before he dies, Les faces up to his former friends in the pub. They had not physically participated in the poofter bashing attempt, but their attitudes and bigotry had contributed to the atmosphere which had allowed such violence to thrive. Les implicitly berates them for this by throwing his Korean War medals onto the floor:

“I killed young men in the name of freedom… and look what I got! Well you can find yourselves another hero, fellas. I resign!” (Morphett, 1986).

One surprising incident reveals that Les and Johnnie have their own irrational AIDS fears – in a scene which mirrors the pub incident when others refuse to share glasses, Les and Johnnie attend a communion service but decline to share a communion cup with others. This causes the local priest, Father Jacko, to guess the true nature of Les’ illness. Jacko becomes the only townsman to offer Les, Johnnie and Dr. Randall his unconditional support. During his pastoral chats with Les, Jacko concedes that his church contains both “poofter bashers” and others with compassion. Jacko even assists in a reconciliation between Les and Ted during the penultimate scene when they all share communion (and the communion cup) together. Perfect love evidently casts out all fear.

Les is finally struck down with terminal pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, another opportunistic disease common for people with AIDS in the 1980s. He dies in the arms of his lover Johnnie. Later, when the townsfolk attend his funeral, they admit their shame at their own actions, wherein they had expressed intolerance and fear.

A cursory assessment of this episode might suggest that the storyline mirrors the same concepts evident in those few films coming out of Hollywood during the following decade which dared to touch upon the issues of homosexuality or AIDS (often taken to mean the same thing) – featuring stigmatized gay men and outraged or repulsed heterosexuals as a justification for implicit homophobia. Hollywood movies such as “An Early Frost” (1985), “As Is” (1986), “Our Sons” (1991), “Philadelphia” (1993), “My Brother’s Keeper” (1995) and “In The Gloaming” (1997) largely portrayed gay men as the “other” and used plotlines which focused to varying extent upon their heterosexual relatives, friends or acquaintances coming to terms with this shame and the loss caused by their son/brother/friend’s homosexuality and/or his imminent death from AIDS.

Yet it would be unfair to suggest that this episode of “The Flying Doctors” was implicitly endorsing such views. As such, this storyline paralleled the real-life discrimination faced by some Australian gay men with HIV/AIDS at the time, and it metaphorically compared their battle with that of Les as a war veteran. During the eulogy, one character states that “Les Foster was a genuine hero” and perhaps, by extension, the writer sought to imply that all gay men who faced the double-whammy of HIV/AIDS and societal prejudice were heroes of that modern-day battle.

Perhaps the creators of this episode also wanted to challenge their audience to examine their own prejudices as reflected within the shame felt by the other characters at the funeral. This is further demonstrated by the fact that the creators focused largely on the societal rather than the medical problems faced by Les. They avoided the horrifying stereotypical images which were so common in the mass media at the time – of skeletal, emaciated AIDS figures covered in KS legions and confined to hospital beds. In this medically sanitized world, Les Foster’s skin remained unblemished and generally healthy (except for his pasty white face). And despite his terminal pneumonia, he had no cough or breathing difficulties – just a general malaise and he collapsed a couple of times to demonstrate that he was unwell.

Overall, however, this episode demonstrated to its mass audience that AIDS had potentially reached everywhere in Australia – even the fictitious outback town of Cooper’s Crossing – and that it was being accompanied by an epidemic of fear and prejudice.

Conversely, the limitations in the episode are also worth of note. The gay characters made a token appearance in only one episode for the purposes of facing discrimination and death – a cinematic tradition inherited from Hollywood. They came to Cooper’s Crossing – itself an isolated country town – as a metaphor for the social isolation faced by many gay men from the heterosexual community in real life. Moreover, they were presented as isolated and friendless back in the metropolitan city that had lived – there was no gay support network, no care teams, nobody to support and care for them. Perhaps these errors can be attributed to the heterosexist ignorance of the writer and creators, or possibly to the creative restrictions of a television program with a limited time constraint within each episode; either way, all these shortcomings could have been addressed by a small verbal reference in a passing scene.

Significantly, “Return of the Hero” was only the seventeenth episode of this series to be telecast, and the producers were undoubtedly taking some risk by presenting such a controversial story so early in the run of the series. They should be commended in the eyes of history for their willingness to tackle a very strong and deeply felt societal prejudice.

A similar theme was used in episode 92 (season 4, 1988), “A Shadow of Doubt”, in which a mysterious illness was linked to racist fears and potential scapegoating. Once again, the series producers were willing to address the issue of ‘the other’.

Perhaps most significantly, the theme was revisited during Season 8 (July 1991), “Being Positive”. This story also features a visitor to Cooper’s Crossing – this time as a former patient, anthropologist Jerry Davis, who previously suffered a terrible accident that resulted in “lots of blood” being spilt – who reveals that he has tested positive to HIV, and the doctors who saved his life must await the results of their own HIV tests while battling with questions of patient confidentiality and their own fears. It turns out (unsurprisingly) that none of the medical staff has been infected with the virus, but the word slips out around town and bigot Jock Cavendish leads the outrage. Other characters also express intolerance, presuming that Davis is “one of them” until it is finally revealed that he was exposed to the virus during his work in Africa. He is safely heterosexual, and their biggest concern now is whether or not to tell his female paramour.

This episode made some attempts to address discrimination, leading one character to respond to homophobia with a comment that: “There’s not a sliding scale of respectability among victims of this thing. They’re just victims”, a well-intentioned attempt at eliciting sympathy, but which was ironic given that this was around the time that real-life people with AIDS were seeking to no longer be identified as “AIDS victims” but as “people living with AIDS”. Another response: “You should feel sorry for anyone who’s got it” comes across as patronising and lacking authenticity. A concession was made when confronting homophobia: “People like Jock Cavendish and the AIDS virus have got a lot in common: the less you fight them, the more powerful they become”. These well-intentioned attempts to address discrimination nevertheless remain problematic and flawed.

In seeking to address HIV/AIDS among heterosexuals, this episode contextualises ‘the other’ as themselves, and identifies people with AIDS as including haemophiliacs and infants with paediatric transmission, implicitly pointing out that gay men are not the only cohort impacted by the virus. However, the major flaw in this episode was its failure to explicitly mention or directly acknowledge homosexuality or gay men, effectively contributing to homophobic stigma and helping to make homosexuality invisible (or unmentionable) during an era when a medical scourge was decimating the gay male population. While trying to be rational and level-headed, the episode came across as just another example of TV and films (mentioned earlier) that attempted to reimage AIDS as a heterosexual problem and contextualise the stigma as affecting only heterosexuals. While its overall treatment of AIDS was less hysterical than in the earlier episode, its exclusion of homosexuality served to perpetuate the very homophobia that the earlier episode attempted to address.

A Country Practice

Australian television had also enjoyed a popularity of traditional, family-oriented drama programs. Popular series had included The Sullivans and Bellbird in the 1970s; with the show, Neighbours (commencing in 1980) featuring a number of families living in a fictional Melbourne suburb.

A new addition to this tradition, and combining itself with the previous genre of stories set within rural settings, A Country Practice, (ACP) began on Channel 7 at the end of 1981, coincidentally around the time when AIDS was first appearing on the radar. Set in a small fictional country town of Wandin Valley, the series ran throughout the 1980s to generally healthy audience ratings. Major characters included Molly Jones, a young woman whose on-screen death from breast cancer on 5 June 1985 caused national shock-waves; in the words of one commentator: “a nation was in mourning” (Mercado, 2004, p. 165). The show thereby demonstrated that it had the capacity to rouse within its audience great compassion for people afflicted with terrible medical problems. After the series concluded, creator James Davern was quoted as expressing pride that the show had tackled social issues including gay bashing, AIDS, alcoholism, rape, and domestic violence (ibid, p. 170).

In 1986, however, that same producer of ACP expressed reservations about portraying two social issues: incest and AIDS. Davern explained that topics such as AIDS were deemed unsuitable for a family-oriented show:

“We have given it a lot of consideration, and we find that, at this date, February 1986, still not enough is known about how the disease is transmitted, and I don’t believe in scaring people. And the fact that it’s linked so strongly with homosexuality makes it very difficult to make a homosexual AIDS victim a ‘goody’ and sympathetic.” (Tulloch & Moran, 1986, p. 291).

Davern’s assertion that it would be difficult to portray a gay character sympathetically is somewhat a reflection of his times – as explained by Tulloch and Moran when they clarified that the challenge faced by Davern was in “trying to make social deviants realistic yet sympathetic” (ibid) – but was also somewhat untrue. Australian television had been presenting gay and lesbian characters sympathetically (albeit extremely rarely) – since 1972 when the popular and controversial Number 96 had thrust gay character Don Finlayson onto the screen. Other Australian dramas with sympathetic gay or lesbian characters had included, Prisoner and All The Way. It appears that Davern had wanted to steer away from the stereotype that gay=AIDS, and to avoid a repetition of the storyline from The Flying Doctors which examined the prejudice faced by gay men.

Davern’s other assertion that “…not enough is known…” about AIDS and that he wanted to avoid needlessly frightening his viewers, is an interesting one. Taken at face value, it seems incorrect: by February 1986, medical science had clearly identified the virus which caused AIDS, had identified the risk factors, and had even produced a blood test to help identify those who had been exposed to it. What appears to have worried Davern was increasing public concern about AIDS as a potentially heterosexual problem – a concern which would soon be expressed on Australian TV in the form of the Grim Reaper:

“Davern was also aware of the controversy among the medical profession over whether heterosexuals were even at risk from HIV/AIDS, and he apparently wanted to wait until the medical profession had ‘got its story right’. He decided to wait until a different angle could be found and the ‘story’ of heterosexual transmission had been confirmed.” (Tulloch & Lupton, 1997, p. 102).

Nevertheless, following the appearance of the Grim Reaper and Suzi’s Story, the producers of ACP evidently felt further pressure from the Australian Medical Association (AMA) to finally broach the subject of AIDS:

“According to James Davern, the AMA had been putting ‘some pressure’ on him since 1987, trying to persuade him to produce an AIDS story for ACP.” (ibid, p. 101).

His response was to adopt this ‘new angle’ to AIDS, focusing on the danger suggested by the Grim Reaper: that is, that non-gay Australians were also at risk of exposure to AIDS *(ibid, p. 102). Specifically, the dangers faced by females and injecting drug users became the focus of a four-part ACP story, episodes numbers 591 to 594 (MacAlpine, 2009?a), entitled, Sophie, telecast in 1988.

Sophie was the daughter of the major character Dr. Terence Elliott. She was a news journalist who had travelled the world for her work MacAlpine, 2009?b) – also developing a drug habit along the way. Her death from AIDS gave viewers a glimpse of AIDS which avoided the gay stereotype, but it simultaneously revisited the subject matter of the Grim Reaper advertisement and Suzi’s Story in that it presented a young woman dying of AIDS. The only ‘new angle’ in the story was that Sophie was an injecting drug user – a topic which might raise questions at that time about whether it comprised “wholesome family viewing” relative to homosexuality.

One of the writers of these episodes was Tony Morphett, who had previously written the first AIDS episode of The Flying Doctors. He was reportedly quite keen to produce a story about injecting drug users because he felt that this was a target audience which needed to be informed and educated about the dangers of AIDS.

Despite this, in the context of history, then, ACP can arguably be seen as a disappointment because the story of young Sophie Elliott and her battle against AIDS lasted only 4 episodes – and in the final episode of the series, a “flashback” included recognition of actress Lorraine Bayly who had played the mother of an “AIDS victim” in another story (Mercado, 2004, p. 169) – taking the number of episodes to feature AIDS to a mere 6 in the entire run of 1058 episodes. At the time, gay men were primarily afflicted with AIDS, but ACP evidently shied away from this topic apparently because of Davern’s previously-stated concern that a gay character with AIDS would not attract viewer sympathy. This was not an unwise perspective: societal homophobia was still rampant across Australia, and positive portrayals of homosexuality might easily have led to viewer protests, outrage or boycotts.

This treatment of AIDS ties in with American television’s treatment of the same issue at that time: up until 1988, the only characters to die of AIDS in US daytime soap operas had been women (eg. see Waggett, 1997, p. 36). That did not change until 1988, when the program As the World Turns introduced a gay character whose off-screen lover was HIV-positive (ibid, pp. 62 & 63).

We can see these programs as interacting with communal folklore: although not necessarily folklore in themselves, they were influenced by – and, in turn, contributed to – our national AIDS folklore at the time. Other TV shows that came later (in particular “GP” on ABC television) had more inclusive and diverse perspectives, and will be examined in later blog posts – as will books and films.

How To Have Sex in an Epidemic:

One of the earliest COVID fiction books to be published was Love in the Time of COVID, and its author is attributed with exploring a more individualistic approach to the impact of this most modern of epidemics:

“Have a nice big helping of residual simmering rage (so great for the immune system!) at being abandoned by our ‘leaders,’ at the profiteers and incompetents and liars, at a cleverly murderous microscopic entity that wants to exploit you as a host and strip your organs for parts.” – Kipnis, 2022, quoted by Iglesias, 2022.

This appears to contradict another COVID story which is more in line with the writings of Plague-era Daniel Defoe:

“People were dying in the city. Some more than others. The virus had roamed the earth but had chosen to settle down there.” – Dee Cameron, watching the COVID epidemic from afar, in “Our Country Friends” (Gary Shteyngart, 2021).

It seems our modern folklore of AIDS, and COVID (and its consequent epidemic of loneliness) has yet to be invented and written. Will we remember our heroes, or our denialists?

[EDIT: This blog was edited on 4 September 2024 to add and reinterpret material from its analysis of the “Flying Doctors” episode “Being Positive”.]

Bibliography:

Author Unknown, 2024. Library Research Guide for Folklore and Mythology, Harvard Library, last updated 31 July.

William Bascom, 1954. “Four Functions of Folklore“, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 67, No. 266), October – December, pp. 333-349 (JSTOR).

Albert Camus, 1947. (Robin Buss translator), The Plague, Penguin Books, reprinted 2001.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., 2004. “Preamble: INTRODUCTION TO THE 2004 COMMEMORATIVE EDITION”, in Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1949 (reprinted 2004), pp. xxiii – lxv.

Diane E. Goldstein, 2004. “What Exactly Did They Do with That Monkey, Anyway? Contemporary Legend, Scientific Speculation, and the Politics of Blame in the Search for AIDS Origins”, (chapter) in Once Upon A Virus, University Press of Colorado, Utah State University Press, pp. 77-99.

Gabino Iglesias, 2022. “Are we ready for COVID-19 as a central theme in literature?”, npr.org, 24 February.

Tony Judt, 2001. “Introduction”, in Albert Camus (translated by Robin Buss), The Plague, Penguin Books, originally published in 1947.

David Keys, 1999. Catastrophe, Arrow Books, (reprinted 2000), chapters 2 & 7.

Laura Kipnis, 2022. Love in the Time of Contagion, Pantheon.

Bevan Lee, 1991. “Being Positive”, The Flying Doctors, Crawfords Productions.

Deborah Lupton, 2022. “Life, death, intimacy and privilege: 4 works of COVID fiction – and what they say about us”, The Conversation, 12 September.

Kitty MacAlpine, 2009?a. “A Country Practice: Episode Guide Index”, ~~http://acountrypractice.com/Guide/gindex.html~~[dead link], accessed 16 January.

Kitty MacAlpine, 2009?b. “A Country Practice: Dr. Terence Stephen Elliott”, ~~http://acountrypractice.com/Char/tselliott.html~~[dead link], accessed 16 January.

Evelyn McDonnell with Kathy Silberger, 1997. Rent by Jonathan Larson, HarperCollins Books.

Andrew Mercado, 2004. Super Aussie Soaps, Pluto Press.

Tony Morphett, 1986. “Return of the Hero”, The Flying Doctors, Crawfords Productions.

Gary Shteyngart, 2021. Our Country Friends, Random House.

John Tulloch & Deborah Lupton, 1997. Television, AIDS and Risk, Allen & Unwin.

John Tulloch & Albert Moran, 1986. A Country Practice: ‘Quality Soap’, Currency Press.

Gerard J. Waggett, 1997. The Soap Opera Encyclopedia, HarperPaperbacks.

T. Zuk, 1998a. “The Flying Doctors Miniseries“, Australian Television Information Archive.

T. Zuk, 1998b. “The Flying Doctors/RFDS“, Australian Television Information Archive, page created 10 November.

= = =

This was preparatory work for my PhD studies on, “A Social History of HIV/AIDS in Melbourne During the ‘Crisis Years’ 1981 to 1997”; this latter work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Fandom is a Way of Life

When I was young and idealistic, I helped to start a Star Trek club which will soon celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Over the intervening decades, I have had many people thank me for starting the club, because it introduced them to lifelong friends or partners, or because it literally saved their lives by giving them a form of inclusive, accepting family when they were feeling otherwise alienated, different and alone. To my mind, any club that can have such impact is remarkable.

Of course, any such impact was none of my doing, but is testimony to what it means to be a fan – that often-maligned cohort of people – and what their life journey can teach all people.

Academic Matthew Hills summarises the most popular problematic stereotype for fans: “… the stereotype of “the fan” has been one of geeky, excessive, and unhealthy obsession with (supposedly) culturally trivial objects such as TV shows.” According to this stereotype, science fiction and media fans are often post-adolescent young men who live in their parents’ basement, spend their days on the computer, and can’t get a date for Saturday night. From my decades of involvement with the fan community, I know this stereotype is dismally wrong. Ironically, it may even have been encouraged by sexist portrayals of related female gender stereotypes: the groupie, the fangirl and the shipper (see Gerrard, 2022).

The negative stereotype of sci fi fans has created difficulties for people who enjoy some literary and entertainment franchises, and who seek social connection within science fiction fan communities that are proudly inclusive of those living with autism and other forms of diversity. In its most harmful manifestation, fans of gaming or social media are linked to hikikimori, which is now recognised as a “mental health phenomenon” resulting in chronic social withdrawal for over a million people.

And fandom – the collective networking of fans within community groups sharing common interests – is actually much more than a few socially awkward people coming together.

Fans are everywhere: fans are humanity.

Shit Hits the Fan

In my childhood, I was told that the word “fan” was short for “fanatic” – with an 1885 sports report in a Kansas newspaper using that exact terminology. This opens up the definition of “fan” to encompass people from sports enthusiasts to those who love music or stamp collecting. From pottery clubs to Potterheads; from dog walking enthusiasts to furries, fans are everywhere.

But modern dictionaries such as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary remain conflicted between defining fans as being either enthusiastic hobbyists, or excessive, uncritical zealots. I see ample evidence that this negative stereotype remains common today across a broad range of fandoms: Are country music fans racist? Are cinephiles unable to have jobs or sex lives? Should certain football fans stop stealing cars, living off Centrelink, wearing moccasins, and aspiring to romance their cousin after he/she gets parole?

Clearly, society needs to outgrow its childish and patronising attitude towards fandoms that are inclusive and diverse. This is true in no small part not only because we need to stop discriminating against others, but because such attitudes also harm ourselves.

We are all fans.

Fandom of the Opera

Fandom and its constituent parts (fan fiction, fan films, cosplay, clubs etc) have a long and complex entanglement with intellectual property rights, copyrights, and modern understandings of literature and culture. Indeed, fandom predates those modern understandings. Everything from Shakespeare’s plays to the Shades of Gray novels are themselves forms of fan fiction that are evocative of other, earlier, inspirational material. So much of our culture proceeds from fandom of our daily soap opera. As I noted in an earlier blog post:

Fan fiction (otherwise known as fanfic or fic) has a long and obscure history. In olden days, before writing was common and oral stories were more popular, it may be that myths and legends, and heroic tales such as those of the Trojan War, Atlantis, Robin Hood, Cleopatra and Hypatia may have included types of fic. In later times, Shakespeare and other authors created classic fic stories.

For example, one only has to ponder the original tales of King Arthur, stories of a local Saxon king who helped to banish the Romans from Britain. Those original tales may now be lost forever in the Dark Ages, but after centuries of oral fan fiction, and getting mixed with the medieval French culture featuring knights in shining armour, chivalry and Camelot, our legends of the boy who pulled the sword from the stone and grew up to lead the Knights of the Round Table, are forever etched in our folklore.

These days, there is even religious fan fiction, which harks back to the origins of mythology and folklore: any difference between the historical and mythologial construction of religious figures was all fan fiction. Collecting and deciding which fan fiction (oral folklore) to accept as Biblical canon was a process that effectively took centuries, and there is dispute even today over whether this was ultimately achieved at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE.

Fandom is as old as humanity.

Fandom of the Opera

Arguably, the first people to become widely accepted under our modern definitions of “fans” were the Janeites, a fandom originally comprised largely of male professors, publishers and readers, who enthused over the works of Jane Austin after 1870. One modern Janeite speaks of the world of plenty now afforded their fandom and, by metaphoric extension, to many others:

“We are fortunate in our fandom to have a sumptuous buffet of pleasures before us. First and most importantly, we have the novels. We also have the wonderful (and not-so-wonderful) film adaptations; we have biographies and histories; we have sequels, retellings, and fan fiction; we have book bags, bumper stickers, and Regency gowns. We can pick and choose from all these delightful manifestations of our chosen obsession, and in true Janeish style, perhaps poke a bit of gentle fun at the more ridiculous. We are all Janeites, under the skin, and in our hearts.” (Elliott, 2001).

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

From around the same time as the birth of Janeites, arose the Sherlockians, enthusiasts of Sherlock Holmes who not only wrote some of the earliest modern fan fiction, but actually influenced the fictional life and death (and resurrection due to popular demand) of Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes is often seen as the birth of modern fandoms because of the intersectionality of its meta with real life. As Michael Saler notes:

“The wonderful irony of this situation is that at the same time that Doyle was criticized for claiming that fairies were real, many of his readers were claiming that Sherlock Holmes was real. Indeed, Holmes was the first character in modern literature to be widely treated as if he were real and his creator fictitious.” (Saler, 2003, p. 600).

Saler goes on to note the Holmes franchise as the progenitor of many secular reworkings of older mythological or religious traditions in the modern era that have inspired millions of fans to become conversant in alternate realities of fantasy, living in a mixture of cultural appropriation and continuing the tradition of adding to the original material.

Fandom is part of belonging to a human community; the wisdom is to know what is healthy, helpful and best expresses our humanity.

Future Perfect

Are you a fan of sport, literature, art, music, the Olympics, a political or religious philosophy, pet animals, gardening, certain books or TV shows, your favourite actor or singer, poetry, crosswords, science fiction, anime, astronomy – or a million other topics? Welcome to the family. Just please stop looking down on your brethren in other forms of fandom.

Meanwhile, as my local fan community approaches its half-century of Austrek, we should recognise that fandom as a human movement is larger and older than we can conceive. And ahead, the future beckons.

Bibliography:

Laura Boyle, 2001. “’What’s in a Janeite?”, janeaustin.co.uk, 11 January.

Ysabel Gerrard, 2022. “Groupies, Fangirls and Shippers:The Endurance of a Gender Stereotype”, American Behavioral Scientist, Volume 66, Issue 8, July 2022, Pages 1044-1059, SAGE Publications, 2021.

Michael Saler, 2003. “’Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes’: Mass Culture and the Re-Enchantment of Modernity, c. 1890-c. 1940”, The Historical Journal, Vol. 46, No. 3 (September 2003), pp. 599-622 (JSTOR).

Mission to Planet Earth

Earthrise from the Moon – as photographed by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders at Christmas 1968 (NASA photo).

On the 55th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, why should we care about the space program?

On a warm summer evening in 1979 – we are told by Joshua Zeitz – some 7000 violent fans rioted in a Chicago baseball stadium, leaving it in tatters. ‘It wasn’t bad pitching that incited the mob to storm the field between games,’ he quotes from a newspaper account, ‘It was disco.’

Image by Tibor Janosi Mozes from Pixabay

It seems that a local media celebrity had proposed “Disco Demolition Day” which would feature physically blowing up a pile of disco records on the playing field during intermission. Egged on by the local media, fans brought along their vinyl for destruction, which they used in part as frisbies (or projectiles) to assist in the build-up of escalating tensions, which also included waving protest banners, storming the field and tearing out the batting cage, setting off firecrackers and starting fires; and ultimately inciting a riot that led to dozens of arrests and injuries. Ultimately, Zeitz concludes of this particular demolition sentiment:

“… An obvious explanation for the Disco Demolition Night riot might center on the desire of white, working-class baseball fans to strike out against an art form that they associated with African Americans, gays and lesbians, and Latinos. A long decade of stagflation, conflicts over busing and affirmative action, fallout from the Vietnam War, and popular anxieties about relaxed sexual mores left working-class whites desperate to put a human face on the impersonal, highly disruptive social changes that were reordering their world. Disco, which claimed its roots in urban black and gay neighborhoods, and which celebrated a libertine approach to sex and personal expression, was a perfect target for white rage.”(Zeitz, 2008)

A generation after the Disco Demolition movement, we observe a much larger, vocal and potentially dangerous groundswell that has been building over the intervening years. We now see a large voting bloc of disaffected US whites who face a choice: to vote for a President out of a spirit of fear and anger, seeking to destroy everything that they perceive as a threat to their privilege; or to vote more wisely for temperance and democracy. This situation is reminiscent of “Nightfall”, an old science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov, about a world that faces darkness once every era, when an eclipse covers their world, with the resultant societal panic and chaos causing the downfall of civilisations.

How does this relate to the space program? Aside from the obvious loss of science and scientists in any upcoming Christian Taliban Dark Age, there are lessons that western leaders and culture have failed to learn from our science and its history.

Learning for Life

AI generated image
Image by dlsd cgl from Pixabay

“If I could travel back into time, it would be to the Library of Alexandria, because all the knowledge in the ancient world was within those marble walls. The destruction of the library was a warning to us 1,600 years later: we must never let it happen again.” – Carl Sagan (Ovenden, 2020).

In Cosmos, Sagan spoke about the loss of the Library at Alexandria, repeating a common myth about the methods and forms of its disappearance (O’Neill, 2017; Ovenden, 2020). However, one thing that he did explain accurately: the loss of the Library was a tragedy to the world’s literature, sciences and history. We must avoid a repeat of the social conditions that led to its disappearance, so as to avoid a repetition amidst our modern forms of libraries, repositories and archives – plus all the networks, educational centres and opportunities they represent. As I write this, the world is recovering from an outage that disrupted some elements of the world Internet. Can we ever afford to lose it all, even for a short amount of time? Or what would a fascist Gilead era do to our accumulated wealth of knowledge today? Or for that matter, if the great unwashed white hordes with their pitchforks and torches descend once again on Washington DC after the upcoming November Presidential election, who will speak for civilisation?

Sagan made one final observation about the fall of the library: that its loss did not appear to make a splinter of difference to the world as it was at the time. Why was this? Because the scientists and scholars in the library did not apply their knowledge to the outside world. Expert knowledge about agriculture or ploughing, for example, might have been left inside the walls of the Library and not shared with the farmers outside – hence its loss made no difference to the huddled masses.

We must be careful to avoid a repetition of this cultural failure. Education (including public television education) is needed. Perhaps this is where we need to have fewer Kardashians and more Cosmos; less Survivor and more Sesame Street. We need to point out to anti-science conspiracy theorists and Moon landing deniers that they live in the modern world, replete with space age technology – ranging from their smart phones and GPS tracking to the CAT and MRI scanners that may have saved their lives. We need to educate them about how much of the modern world – ranging from agricultural and food refrigeration techniques, from satellite weather forecasting to bushfire and flood mitigation, from air traffic control to vaccine storage technology, from the Internet to social media – have impacted their lives after being invented or assusted by the space program.

This to me is NASA’s greatest deficiency: not because they failed to return to the Moon for fifty years, but because they neglected to inform the masses during the last five decades of how their spinoff technology has changed and improved our lives forever. They forgot to remind us all about space spinoffs beyond astronaut ice cream, gravity defying pens, and space blankets. To me, that’s like Christopher Columbus returning from his voyages of exploration, invasion and conquest, and informing Queen Isabella that the future of the Americas might be extrapolated as providing paltry farming land for corn and a few forests of firewood – but little else.

The Apollo program provided the largest injection of cash and funding into non-military science in history. Its offshoot so far is over 2000 spinoffs and ongoing technological development that is worth at least $469 billion today.

Against this reality, NASA’s greatest failure of imagination was not failing to anticipate and prevent the Apollo 1 disaster, but neglecting to fully exploit its own proven potential to change and save our future. The best is yet to come.

“We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” — astronaut Bill Anders.

In 1968. astronaut Bill Anders photographed ‘Earthrise’ from lunar orbit (see photo at the top of this article) and this spearheaded the greatest environmental movement in human history. NASA’s subsequent ‘Mission to Planet Earth’ became the vanguard for a movement to utilise space technology and research to focus on improving our lives on planet Earth, that pixel of colour in a cold, largely dead cosmos. This included using space and satellite data to warn the world about the hole in the Ozone layer, motivating world governments to fix the problem. The same opportunities exist today to mitigate against climate catastrophe.

This is the greatest reality we overlook: that despite our insular wars, even refugees have access to space age mobile phones that link them to the outside world; that satellites are documenting our escalating climate change crisis; and that it is becoming increasingly difficult for dictators and monopoly news media to censor and oppress nonconformist voices. This is the genuine dissent that conspiracy theorists promote without any real understanding of its true potential: we are the world; we can shape and change our future thanks to space. Science can get out the word if we make it a priority.

Radio personality Casey Kasem, is known for the sign-off signature of his radio program: “Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars.” Such a metaphor summarises our daily challenge: to keep striving for betterment through the space sciences while remaining firmly grounded in reality. This may yet prove to be our ultimate calling as a species.

References:

Burtel Edison, 1985, “Mission to Planet Earth”,
Science (New Series) Vol. 227, No. 4685, January 25, p. 367. (JSTOR)

Tim O’Neill, 2017. “The Great Myths 5: The Destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria”, History for Atheists, 2 July.

Richard Ovenden, 2020. “The Story of the Library of Alexandria Is Mostly a Legend, But the Lesson of Its Burning Is Still Crucial Today”, Time, 17 November. (JSTOR)

J. Zeitz, 2008, Rejecting the Center: Radical Grassroots Politics in the 1970s — Second-Wave Feminism as a Case Study, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 43, No. 4 (October), pp. 673-688. (JSTOR)

Waking in Fright to Suzi’s Story

“Wake in Fright” is not only a title of a 1971 Australian film, but it is a call to arms for people who want to stir themselves from the sleep of complacency or inaction, and commence the journey from awareness to action – the difference from being awake to being woke. But a generation ago, this film touched upon a number of themes that were becoming relevant during its time, and it can still speak to us today as part of Australian culture – challenging the “She’ll be right, mate” dismissal of injustice and suffering.

And perhaps not surprisingly, women led one particular movement for related social activism, and one early advocate effectively used her life (and death) to call for calm compassion.

US film critic Roger Ebert reviewed the film under the headline “An Outback horror story” – which it certainly is, with its depiction of outback isolation and alcohol-fuelled violence, its toxic masculinity (including sexual assault and virulent homophobia), and its repulsive documentation of kangaroo slaughter (a scene which reportedly caused a walkout of some audience members during a 2009 screening at Cannes).

Given that “Wake in Fright” is a no-nonsense expose about living on the geographically and culturally violent fringe of Outback Australia – and I have seen it referred to as being one of a wave of “Ozploitation” films that might also including “Mad Max” and “Wolf Creek” – it is perhaps not surprising that the film was “lost” for about forty years, and rediscovered a generation later. James Guida in The New Yorker suggested that:

“…When it was released it was so angrily denounced by the filmgoing public in Sydney that it disappeared forever — well, nearly. They were so aghast at the world of violence, aggression, ritualistic drinking, brutality toward nature and warped homoerotic sexuality masquerading as macho masculinity and bogus male bonding, that [the film] was a box-office flop.”

Somehow during my tender teenage years, I watched this film on television (before it disappeared) and its scenes of boganism were later recalled when, like the film’s protagonist (a school teacher), I was also assigned a job in the school of a dusty country town. For me, the isolation and culturally desolate landscapes were very real, and the film’s kangaroo killings were revisited when I joined some local “mates” on what I thought was a social night, but which became (for them) a night of “bunny bonking” (hunting rabbits by guns and spotlight). The film’s underside of Australian culture was very evocative of real life.

But for me, the film’s most frightening depictions of violence were its cultural hatred and repulsion towards homosexuality. Created during the same era in which Hollywood was churning out films like, “The Boys in the Band:” and “Midnight Cowboy”, inferred depictions of LGBT+ characters in films were generally self loathing or aberrant, adding an undercurrent of seediness or villainy to characters who were destined to either die or lead lives of loneliness (later revisited in “Brokeback Mountain”). Aussie films during this era, such as “The Everlasting Secret Family” and “The Adventures of Barry Mackenzie” followed suit, with LGBT+ characters either queer coded as part of their inferred displays of deviance, or were subjected to larrikin slurs of being comedic “poofters”. Such stereotypes were later examined by film historian Vito Russo as part of the western culture of queer invisibility or oppression. It would be some time before our culture would feel the impact of the US Stonewall Riots, or the publication of the gay liberation tome, “Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation” by Australian activist Dennis Altman.

Meanwhile, “Wake in Fright” disappeared and was presumed effectively lost. I recalled the film with probable confusion caused by my having seen it at such a young age and being probably unable to fully absorb and process its nuances and multilayered meanings. I vaguely recalled its homophobic depictions of male bonding and homophobic male self-loathing, reinterpreting these through the lens of a fellow teacher, a woman who once casually commented about teenage schoolboys fighting in our schoolyard: “I wonder if boys like to fight and wrestle because it’s the only way that they can touch and have emotional closeness to other males without being accused of being gay”. I saw the deep-seated threat of homophobic, toxic male violence first-hand in that country town one day, when the local radio station had declared the day to be “Blue Jeans Day” and had jokingly called for people to wear blue jeans as a way of “coming out” as gay. I had coincidentally worn blue jeans to school that day, and my students joked about it while I tried to have a mature (but age appropriate) conversation with them about human rights and equality – in the days before Anti Discrimination laws. One of the other young male teachers (a known womaniser), when also jokingly questioned by his students about his blue jeans, became loudly and physically aggressive, literally threatening to assault the nearest student if anything more was said on the matter. It seemed that the visceral violence of the outback country town from the film could also be found in real-life locations elsewhere in Australia. And there I lived: in an isolated, threatening, cultural desert.

But the most frightening correlation between the film and real life happened in 1995 when its star, Gary Bond, died of AIDS. His gay life – and his death – remained largely hidden from polite Australian society. Perhaps his homosexuality was another reason why the film had largely disappeared.

This was the era of AIDS, when public toilets frequently boasted graffiti that read “GAY = Got AIDS Yet?” or “AIDS = Anally Inserted Death Sentence” and became one focal point for roaming gangs of “poofter bashers” (I even recall reading in the newspaper about a young father who was bashed to death on a nearby train just for allegedly looking gay). Despite a number of prominent Australians speaking up for tolerance, acceptance, and in opposition to homophobia and AIDSphobia, other prominent Australians spoke of gay men (and other disempowered cohorts) as being ‘radical deviants’ (Simper, 1986) or purveyors of ‘brazen indulgences… to spread AIDS in Australia” (Nile, 1986).

The gay community had rallied and successfully conducted “safe sex” campaigns to reduce the spread of HIV, but this had remained largely within their own or related affected communities – all of them stigmatised and marginalised. They needed someone to speak up on their behalf. One early such advocate was a young woman who, along with her husband, became a mouthpiece for AIDS activism that had the potential to heighten and spread fear – but their loving, gentle voices gave testimony to a more compassionate, loving approach.

Suzi’s Story – Be Awake and Be Woke

“Forgive.”
– Vince Lovegrove explains Suzi’s advice to him about life in Suzi’s Story
(Lovegrove, 1987a).

The television documentary Suzi’s Story focussed on the family of Vince and Suzi Lovegrove, a young couple in Sydney who had met in the 1983 and had married shortly after the birth of their son Troy. Before long, the tragedy of AIDS would strike this family.

Vince Lovegrove later recalled their early days together in New York City and the ignorance that pervaded communities that were already affected:

“During my time in New York I lived in Christopher Street, Greenwich Village and the homosexual community would demonstrate in the streets, handing out information pamphlets and collecting fighting funds for this new disease that was confined to the gay community. We thought.

“This was 1983, and we had nothing against gays. But even so, just to ensure our safety, when we descended the three flights of stairs in our small apartment block and walked onto the street, we scanned the sidewalks. We wanted to be doubly sure we wouldn’t catch AIDS by accidentally brushing past someone who was infected. We talked about it often, sometimes seriously, but mostly jokingly, congratulating ourselves on how lucky we were not to be at risk.”(Lovegrove, 1993. p. 2.)

But even back then, warning signs were present:

“Ironically, Suzi was constantly ill from the moment we met. She often suffered from tiredness, lethargy; on a few occasions there were skin rashes, vomiting…. Maybe a cold, a change of weather, a hangover, stressed-out Manhattan living. Always a plausible explanation for the simplest of symptoms.” (ibid)

On 10 March 1986, now living in Australia, their worst fears were confirmed. Blood tests revealed that Suzi had HIV antibodies, indicating that she had been exposed to HIV some years earlier (ibid, p. 4), and both she and her son Troy were eventually diagnosed with AIDS.

The documentary Suzi’s Story was filmed in early 1987, chronicling their family’s life in the weeks leading up to Suzi’s death. The love and support they received from relatives was contrasted against the mixed response from friends – some supportive, others fearful and rejecting. The program was sensitive but also blunt: Vince shared how he and Suzi had enjoyed sex together for years without his becoming infected; his daughter from a previous marriage discussed whether her school friends (or their parents) would be supportive.

It was also a time of great testing – and not simply from their battle with AIDS. Vince reported that he had to battle four court cases over his and Suzi’s right simply to film their documentary at all, as many people evidently disagreed with the wisdom of filming the last months of a dying woman’s life (ibid, p. 66). It seemed that the societal taboo against death was another hurdle that people with AIDS would have to overcome if they wanted to have their problem dealt with openly and honestly.

Suzi’s Story aired on Channel 10 on 23 June 1987, only nine days after Suzi Lovegrove’s death from AIDS. The viewer response was “unprecedented” (Johnstone, 1987) and led to a repeat screening on 9 July 1987, preceded by newsman David Johnstone reading aloud extracts from three sample letters which had been written by viewers responding to the first screening. He also stated at the end of the second screening that the viewer response led Channel 10 to believe that the documentary had contributed to breaking down the stigma associated with AIDS (ibid).

Positive viewer response also led Vince Lovegrove to write a eulogy to his wife in Sydney’s Sun newspaper prior to the second screening of the documentary on 9 July:

“Well, you really did it this time, my love…Viewers fell in love with you and your dignity…You smashed all the myths of AIDS to smithereens…

“And they now know what is needed most by victims. Love. You should be damned proud. And Australians should be proud of their response…” (Lovegrove, 1987b).

The newspaper also reported that “a massive wave of sympathy and support” included money to support young Troy Lovegrove in his own battle against AIDS (ibid). The documentary even won a 1987 Human Rights Award as testimony to its widespread impact in fighting stigma.

The emotional and compassionate response of Australians to this young heterosexual couple and their family began a slow, glacial transformation to extend compassion to others at risk, who remained invisible: gay and bisexual men, injecting drug users, haemophiliacs, and their female sexual partners and infants. That stigma was still there – although Vince and Suzi Lovegrove (and their children) had challenged such fear, ignorance and stigma with their own brand of calm courage. Australia woke in fright – and began a journey forward into a new era of both effective HIV medications and a more compassionate society that was learning respect for diversity.

Other advocates – especially women – would come forward in those early days of a terrible double epidemic (one of a virus, and one of stigma and rejection). But young Suzi Lovegrove set the scene for change by appearing on televisions in living rooms around Australia, and making people weep for those lost to AIDS. Her husband Vince was tragically killed in a car accident on 24 March 2012, but Suzi and Vince should be remembered and honoured as people who were willing to stand up (at considerable cost to themselves) against a terrible plague and its terrible stigma. We can still learn from their example today.

References:

Author unknown, 1996. “Proud lives remembered: World AIDS Day 1996”, in Sydney Star Observer, 28 November, pp. 2 & 3.

Roger Ebert, 2012. An Outback horror story, RogerEbert.com, 31 October.

Gilda Golden, 2024. The Impact of Queer Invisibility: from Alienation to Inspirational Representation, Medium.com, 7 June.

James Guida, 2012. “Wake In Fright”: Prepare to Be Disturbed, Mate, The New Yorker, 4 October.

David Johnstone, 1987. Introduction to repeat screening of “Suzi’s Story”, Channel 10, 9 July.

Vince Lovegrove, 1987a. Interviewed in “Suzi’s Story”, A Carlyon-Gillespie Production, in association with Pro-image Productions for Network Ten Australia.

Vincent Lovegrove, 1987b. “My Dearest Suzi”, the Sun (Sydney), 9 July.

Vincent Lovegrove, 1993. A kid called Troy, ABC Books.

Andrew McCallum, 2014. The Hunt: Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971), Key Moments in Australian Cinema, Issue #70, March.

Fred Nile MLC, 1986. “Scrap Gay Mardi Gras”, The Australian, 21 February.

Errol Simper, 1986. “CEP funds wasted on ‘deviant radicals’,” The Australian, 12 March.

= = =