JAY CARMICHAEL Marlo. Reviewed by Ivan Crozier

Set in the 1950s, Jay Carmichael’s second novel is a window onto Australia’s queer history.

In the closing paragraph of the author’s note to Marlo, Jay Carmichael tells us that for him, ‘the task of the historical novel’ is to fill the gap between what we know about the persecution of the ‘male homosexual’ in mid-twentieth century Australia and what we can infer about these lives. Marlo could thus be read as a history lesson.

This short novel (which includes a number of photographs) tells the story of Christopher, who moves from the rural Gippsland town of Marlo, where he grew up, to Melbourne. There he moves in with Kings, the person who first awakened his homosexual desires when he showed him his sprouting pubic hair. Kings is the epitome of normative Australian masculinity, with his James Dean good looks and his racy relationship with Dotty, a previously married woman. He is a journalist for the Bulletin specialising in court reporting, and it is by listening to his telephone dispatches each evening detailing the activities of the Vice Squad in apprehending homosexuals in Melbourne’s nocturnal parks, that Christopher learns about the opportunities gay Melbourne has to offer.

He also learns about the homophobic tactics the police employ, and the opprobrium in which gay desires are held by society. This is an excellent literary device. For readers not familiar with the historiography of homosexuality, Marlo offers a sound summary of some of the challenges gay men faced in post-World War II Australia, although I would advise them to be skeptical about the paragraph about the medicalisation of homosexuality on page 145. For those who know this material, much more could have been said.

Christopher is stuck between two worlds. He has a job as a car mechanic and wants nothing more than to have his own home, an ambition that would afford him a private space of his own. He is also gay and seeks out anonymous public sex in parks. Through these nocturnal expeditions he encounters Morgan, an Aboriginal man who becomes his love interest, and Jacqui, a gender-fluid person who becomes something of a mentor, taking him to a queer cafe in the centre of town where the scope of gay life is paraded before him.

Morgan is a complex character, and would have benefited from further development. His Aboriginality is not immediately disclosed, only becoming apparent when he has to show his ‘dog tag’, or Certificate of Exemption under the Aborigines Protection Act, which allows him to be in public spaces. While it is admirable that Carmichael has included an Indigenous character, there is much more that could have been explored. Christopher is apparently colourblind, in that he offers little opinion on race or interracial connections. Given the setting of 1950s Australia, I found this somewhat implausible for a rural character. Other people react to Morgan, such as Christopher’s sister Iris (who is as challenged by Christopher coming out as she is by him bringing his Aboriginal boyfriend to her wedding). Likewise, Morgan is refused a beer in a hotel by the publican. But when compared to an author such as Tony Birch, we learn little from Carmichael about First Nations life in this period.

Gay lives posit an interesting problem for the historian and by extension the historical novelist. There is a paucity of source material, with very few intimate letters between gay men surviving, as they were at risk of becoming evidence of sexual crimes. As we see in Marlo, the letters between Christopher and Morgan are considered potentially incriminating and burned. As such, the historical sources that remain are skewed towards the methods of control of homosexuality: the police and prison archives, the law reports in newspapers, the psychiatric and venereological texts that have constructed our understanding of men who have sex with men. In such sources, homosexuality is often reduced to the crime of sodomy, and how it could be detected and controlled. A fantastic resource for such history pertinent to the book under review (but not in Carmichael’s bibliography) is Lisa Featherstone and A. Kaledelfos’ Sex Crimes in the Fifties (Melbourne UP, 2016). Carmichael relies instead on some of the earlier work of Graham Willett and Dennis Altman.

For those unfamiliar with the historical literature, Marlo affords a great opportunity to learn about past gay lives, including policing methods in the 1950s, when attractive young police officers were used to entrap gay men in public conveniences, and police beat up homosexuals caught cruising in public parks after dark with truncheons and cricket bats. There are details of queer meeting places, such as the coffee shop to which Christopher goes with Julian, showcasing a wide variety of queers, from lesbians dressed in sharp suits to effeminate ‘kamp’ men and ‘queans’ (both contemporary terms for effeminate gay men). These are valuable insights into a past that should not be forgotten, as communities cut off from their pasts are vulnerable.

It is ironic that sex is largely missing from Carmichael’s book, the very thing that sets gay lives apart from others. It is a book saturated with sensation but the sex scenes lack detail. We are told who is on top, but not how it feels, or what kind of sex follows. Morgan moves Christopher’s head towards his crotch, but the blow job is inferred. The physical is evoked more vividly in the descriptions of the baths that Christopher takes, the smells, the sensations on his body, the way he touches his naked body with a cloth to clean off either his day job at the mechanic’s, or his injuries after he is beaten.

By contrast to this avoidance of sexual detail, the descriptions of Christopher’s attack by two men in the park lasts over two pages, with every blow described, every meeting of bodies elaborated in a violent way – it is a sexualised attack, with ‘a crotch pressed against my arse’ while he is held to be punched in the stomach, the body of his assailant described in detail – his muscles, his calloused hands, his strong arms. Christopher’s eyes sting with blood; his body shrinks in pain. He crawls, he cries, he desperately hints at suicide. The violence is described in minute detail, but sexual pleasure is subsumed into romance, or skimmed over.

While it is certainly true that gay men were often subjected to violent attacks that they knew they could not report to the police – and indeed could be attacked by the police themselves – they were also passionate sexual beings. We see this in the pornography and homoerotic art of the period, and in the medico-legal descriptions of their illegal sexual connections. A longer book with more analysis and description would have been much more satisfying.

Carmichael’s novel moves at a steady pace, furnished by sparse details and often beautiful descriptions of landscapes, gestures and emotions. There are also a number of contemporary photographs from the 1950s, which some readers might find helpful to imagine the history of gay life.

Jay Carmichael Marlo Scribe 2022 PB 160pp $24.99

Ivan Crozier was a historian of psychiatry at UCL, University of Edinburgh, and University of Sydney. He currently lives in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales where he is writing a novel about the gay prison that existed at Cooma between 1957 and 1984.

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