Table Of ContentUNREQUITED
LOVE
Diary of an Accidental Activist
Dennis Altman
About this book
‘From Lyndon Johnson to Trump, Altman’s diary takes us
from the early days of AIDS to gay liberation against a
backdrop of Australia’s strange love for America.’
—Gillian Triggs
‘An ingenious combining of memoir and analysis,
personal reflection and social science.’
—Frank Bongiorno
Dennis Altman’s long obsession with the United States began when he
went there as a graduate student during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.
His early writing stemmed from the counter-culture that developed
in the States in the mid-1960s. Altman was involved in early Gay
Liberation, and his 1971 study Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation
is regarded as a classic work in its field. Since then, Altman’s writ-
ings have touched in various ways upon the shifting terrain of sexual
politics, including the AIDs epidemic, which he witnessed from the
onset while living in New York.
Altman’s memoir, Unrequited Love, is as wide-ranging and remarkable
as his career, moving between Australia, the United States, Europe
and parts of Asia, and influenced by encounters with intellectuals and
writers including James Baldwin, Gough Whitlam, Dorothy Porter,
Christos Tsiolkas, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag.
Written through the lens of recent activism and the global rise of
authoritarianism, this is a story of a half century of activism, intel-
lectualism, conflict and friendship.
Unrequited Love: Diary of an Accidental Activist
© Copyright 2019 Dennis Altman
All rights reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australia’s Copyright
Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without prior
written permission from the copyright owners. Inquiries should be directed to
the publisher.
Monash University Publishing
Matheson Library Annexe
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Monash University
Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia
www.publishing.monash.edu
Monash University Publishing brings to the world publications which advance
the best traditions of humane and enlightened thought.
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independent peer review.
ISBN: 9781925835120 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925835137 (pdf)
ISBN: 9781925835144 (epub)
www.publishing.monash.edu/books/ul-9781925835120.html
Series: Biography
Design: Les Thomas
Cover image: Dennis Altman in Rome, 1975. Courtesy of the author.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of
Australia.
Contents
About this book. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .iii
Copyright and imprint information ........................iv
Dedication ............................................vi
Acknowledgements .................................... vii
Introduction ..........................................ix
2016 ................................................. 1
2017 ................................................ 11
2018 ............................................... 127
2019 ............................................... 215
Postscript ........................................... 219
Index .............................................. 221
About the Author .................................... 231
Dedication
For my sister, Vivien
Acknowledgements
Many of the people mentioned in this book also contributed to its
writing, but there are some whose role in my life is far greater than
is apparent, in particular my extended family: Vivien, Rafael, Raul,
Bojana, Mila, Archer, Dani, Scott and all the Rugg and King clan.
Vivien was an invaluable support in retrieving lost memories.
Thanks to my agent, Fiona Inglis, who encouraged me to preserve
when I was unsure if there was a book developing, and to Peter Christoff
and Ian See, who read some of the early drafts, and provided tough
guidance. I’ve come to know and respect Nathan Hollier at Monash
over the past few years, so I was delighted to take the project to him,
and for the support of the team at Monash UP. Thanks too to the
editors at ABR, the Griffith Review, Inside Story, Meanjin, Overland
and the Gay and Lesbian Review who worked with me on stories from
which I’ve drawn in writing this book.
Can a writer have a better friend than a fellow writer who is prepared
to read through a draft manuscript and give honest feedback? Andrea
Goldsmith did just that for me. Nick Henderson at the Australian
Lesbian and Gay Archives helped chase down the cover image. Any
book bears the marks of people whose conversations and hospit ality
sparked off ideas which they may not recognise, so apologies if you’re
not mentioned.
A special thanks for the support of John Dewar, Vice Chancellor at
La Trobe University, and to Rosemary Nanev and Katie Phillis in his
office, whose support was crucial for much of my travel. Although I am
officially retired, I’ve benefitted enormously from ongoing links with
the La Trobe community, in particular many coffee conversations with
Nicholas Barry, Gavin Height, Marian Pitts, Bec Strating and Jasmine
Kim-Westendorf, as I have from the organisers of the conferences I’ve
attended, the remarkable crew at the Wheeler Centre and the guys at
Bookshop Darlinghurst and Hares and Hyenas.
vii
Introduction
This book started to take shape the week following Donald Trump’s
election. I was wandering around San Francisco, which had voted
overwhelmingly against him, aware that the more time I spend in the
United States the more it seems like a foreign country.
Like most Australians of my generation I dreamt of Europe, spec-
ifically of studying further in Britain. I was an undergraduate at the
University of Tasmania in the early 1960s, where one of my lecturers,
Peter Boyce, persuaded me to apply for scholarships to several American
Universities. On my twenty-first birthday I left home, several months
before Lyndon Johnson’s election, to become a graduate student at
Cornell University in upstate New York. My first glimpse of New York
City was as startling as the moment in The Wizard of Oz when black
and white images burst into Technicolor: the glass and concrete of the
newly renamed Kennedy Airport, the noise of the subways, the delis
open into late evening, the people streaming across night streets. Since
then I have spent eight years of my life in the United States, mainly
in New York and California, and a large part of my academic career
back in Australia has revolved around teaching and commenting on
American politics.
The year after Johnson’s election Australia committed troops to fight
alongside the US in Vietnam, and our relations with the United States
stoked bitter political debate about Australian foreign policy. The fol-
lowing year decimal currency was introduced, and Robert Menzies,
the Anglophone PM who had wanted to name the dollar ‘the royal’,
retired. When his successor, Harold Holt, proclaimed “all the way
with LBJ” he marked both a political and a cultural shift. President
Johnson, the first sitting American President to visit Australia, returned
for Holt’s funeral in 1967.
Australia’s love affair with the United States over the past half century
mirrors in some ways my own. Frank Knopfelmacher, the influential
ix
Unrequited Love
right-wing philosopher, once referred to me as “an agent of American
cultural imperialism”, pointing to the dilemma for Australian conser-
vatives in the period of the Vietnam War. For them supporting the
United States was a political imperative, but they deeply distrusted the
new radical politics that came from the United States and threatened
to upend the conventional norms of a small, smug and still largely
Anglo-Celtic society.
When I flew home a week after Trump’s election it felt as if I were
still in the US, so strong were the emotional reactions here. They
were not just realistic fears of what a narcissistic and unpredictable
President might do, there was also a sense of betrayal: America had
let us down. Australians struggle to regard the United States as a
purely foreign power. Some years ago I enraged several right-wing
Labor frontbenchers when I suggested we should view the American
alliance solely through the prism of national interest. “You can’t say
that” expostulated one of them, though why not was never clear. Rather
as older monarchists referred to Britain as the ‘mother country’, many
Australians today draw on American culture to define ourselves, even
as we protest our national uniqueness.
In his novel Amnesia Peter Carey gnaws at our dependence on
the United States like a broken tooth, drawing parallels between a
rape by a World War II serviceman in Brisbane and the overthrow
of Whitlam in 1975. We are all haunted by the United States, even
though our love goes largely unrequited; at best we are the dependable
smaller brother, who gets forgotten when the real guys show up. In
the American science fiction film Arrival the links to Australia are
cut by the US military with the same ruthlessness with which they
dispatch the Sudan. In Ben Rhodes’ account of his eight years as a
foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, The World As It Is, there is one
fleeting reference to Australia, no mention of any of the three Prime
Ministers in office during his Presidency.
In his 2016 Quarterly Essay Enemy Within, which foresees the rise
of Trump, Don Watson desperately wants to believe in America: it
is, he tells us: “a miracle of an ever-evolving pluralist democracy and
x
