Local Gods and Hometown Demons

Editors’ note: The following is the written transcript of a speech originally delivered by the author at My Formative Queers on 14 November 2024. 

Looking back, it seems I have always responded to the sensuality of music. And of dance. My mother has a story she tells about me, about my love for music. The story feels like a memory – I can picture it, hear it – but it doesn’t have the distinctness of being my own remembrance. I think it is because I have heard my mother speak of it often that it has also become part of my own recollections. 

In the house I grew up in, pride of place in the lounge room wasn’t a television, it was a three-in-one stereo cabinet. The turntable sat in the middle, the radio dial was at the front – this was so long ago that there was only AM radio – and on either side of the record player were indented cabinets meant to hold records. One of these cabinets was filled with LPs and 45rpm singles; largely Greek music, folk songs and popular tunes of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and heaps of rembetika, the Greek refugee “blues”. And Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin. That was my musical education as a child.

The other cabinet was empty. My mother claims she would put a record on and that I would clamber up to the stereo, hoist myself into the vacant cavity, curl up in a ball, and listen to the music. She’d find me there, my body rocking gently to the sounds.

I adored dancing. The first dancing I did was at big celebrations: weddings, baptisms, the festivities for Easter and Christmas. I loved holding hands in a circle, moving slowly to the tsamiko or to the sirtó, or spinning wildly to Theodorakis’s feverish score for “Zorba the Greek”. However, these Greek dances had steps you had to master and then follow; you had to watch the adults carefully to work out where to place your left foot, then your right. You had to concentrate to dance.

The first time I realised that there was another way of dancing was in Grade Three. Back in those days, there would be a musical hour hosted on ABC radio specifically for primary school children. There was an accompanying songbook that we were given at the start of each year. We’d sit, all singing along, guided by the printed lyrics. Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, The Seekers and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” One afternoon, my favourite teacher, Ms Luneman – she was the first woman I knew who insisted she was not Miss or Mrs, she was Ms – announced we were going to do something different. She had brought in a turntable and speakers, and she got us all to push back our desks against the wall. “I’m going to play you some music,” she said, “And I want you to dance to it. Dance to it anyway you like. I want you to feel the song.”

She put on Suzi Quatro’s “Can the Can” (1973), that three minutes of pure pop glam pleasure. As soon as the song started, with the thrashing drums and that electrifying guitar riff, we threw our bodies into the dance. I was exhilarated: it was wonderful to move to sound, to music. Many years later, with my first rush on amphetamines, that memory came flooding back. I was a boy, too young to understand, certainly too young to put it in words, but I gleaned in those three minutes that music and dance could be ecstatic. That the senses were about pleasure.

There was a boy in that Grade Three class whom I adored. We were best friends, and we did everything together. He and I were always at each other’s houses, and at school we would spend recess and lunchtime eating together, playing footy, swapping cricket and football cards. We would walk the concrete grounds of North Richmond Primary School holding hands. That’s how much we loved each other. He and I had danced together to “Can the Can”. (I close my eyes, and I can still see his face, the joy in it. The joy in us.) One recess, not long after that explosion of joy, one of the older boys came up to us. He was sneering, and he said, “What are you two? Poofters?” I knew that word; I didn’t know what it meant. My friend’s hand dropped from mine. He never visited my house again.

It couldn’t have been very much later when I first saw the film clip for AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)” (Paul Drane, 1976). It was on Countdown, the music show on the ABC, that we all used to watch religiously. 

The riff went right through me. I stared at the television. I wanted to get up, to dance, to thrash my body to that electricity. But I couldn’t take my eyes off Bon Scott. He scared me, he terrified me, he was like the devil. That grin, that sleazy smile, looking straight at the camera, straight at me: he knew exactly what I was thinking. He and the rest of the band looked like the boys and men who hung out on Victoria St, the guys who sat smoking on the stairwells of the walk-ups near my home. The same snarl, the same tight jeans, worn white at the crotch. Those boys and men who scared me; those boys and men who seemed like gods, like demons. The film clip continued to play. This was Swanston Street, this was Melbourne, this was my city. I knew these street corners, I knew these buildings. Gods and demons lived in my hometown. And the music, those harsh guitar riffs, those simple dynamic drum patterns. The music was pounding me, charging right through me. I was watching, listening, rocking back and forth. I was captivated. I was terrified.

I’d had crushes on singers and musicians before. The Bay City Rollers, the drummer in Sherbet; I had once spent what seemed like hours in a record shop in Bridge Road, holding up the sleeve of a David Essex album, mesmerised by the thick curls of the singer’s hairy chest. I didn’t dare tell anyone. But these crushes didn’t make me feel scared.

Not like Bon Scott. I suddenly understood that word, that word – poofter – that the older boy had hurled at us. I got it. Bon Scott wasn’t clean and neat. Like the Bay City Rollers. Like David Eessex. Bon Scott was sweaty, aware of his physicality, strutting in that film clip, tempting me, teasing me. Those tight pants, that visible bulge in his crotch. He was looking straight at me, and he knew exactly what I was thinking.

The song ended. We were back in the studio of Countdown, Molly Meldrum was telling us to go and do ourselves a favour. I was sweating. I was shaking. I was keeping myself absolutely still.

I didn’t have the words for it back then. It would take years to understand what Bon Scott had gifted me, what he had opened up for me. It was the first glimpse of a future: of battles ahead, of wonders ahead. That music and dance and sex were linked. That so were pleasures and dangers. That I would be fighting and loving these boys and men – these gods and demons – for the rest of my life.