Growing up gay in Australia was difficult. This week’s Sydney council book ban shows how far we have to go | Shannon Molloy

Fourteen, the stage adaptation of my memoir of the same name, captures a moment in history and my life that now feels very distant.

It’s 35 years since 1999, when a lonely, terrified teenager found himself suffocated in a repressive regional Queensland town and trapped in an NRL-mad, all-boys Catholic school, where he was a “faggot,” “faggot,” “ “He bites pillows” and “packs candy,” but they never call him by name.

There was a daily backdrop of extreme violence and relentless taunting: on the playground, on the street, at the mall. Just two years earlier, Tasmania had become the last state in Australia to decriminalize homosexuality; Everything many of us knew about it we got from news stories about the AIDS crisis, true crime documentaries about the murders of dozens of gay men in Sydney, and lazy comic cartoons about flight attendants and promiscuous hairdressers.

That boy spent most of his waking moments loathing the inevitable fact that he was going to end up gay – about the worst thing he could be in that place and at that time – and wondering how he would ever be happy, safe, or loved. I made it out alive thanks to loving friends, protective siblings, a fierce mother, and an extensive catalog of happy, cheesy pop songs. Not everyone was so lucky.

After one of our recent shows in Sydney, a woman in her 50s approached me in the lobby, her eyes red and her cheeks wet.

“Thank God things aren’t like this anymore,” he sighed, holding me tightly.

But really, how much has changed since I was a child? This week, a council in western Sydney voted to strip its local libraries of books about or referencing same-sex parent families. The motivation was to “protect” innocent children from “sexualization.” That part of the city is devoutly religious and family-oriented, the council declared; the implication was that any queer person must be perverted, sinful, committed to destroying the family unit, and somehow taking advantage of children. To me it seems a lot like the old days.

If that’s what we’re facing in 2024, in one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world, what will life be like beyond the big smoke?

Fourteen will visit 20 stops across Australia over the next five months, most of them in the regions. That was very important to me because it is where my story began and where, in some of those towns, being gay is still full of dangers.

The show will travel to Bathurst, about 200 kilometers west of Sydney, and Orange, in the state’s central west. Plans for Pride events in both cities recently attracted vile threats that nearly derailed the festivities. A young man from Dubbo, a few hours drive north of Orange, wrote to me to apologize for not being able to come to our production there. He is too scared to be seen going to a “gay show.”

We scheduled some morning sessions for this tour, hoping that high school teachers would be able to take their classes during school hours, but we heard that there is a great fear of backlash from parents if they even suggest it.

We’ll soon be in Wyong, on the New South Wales Central Coast, where a political candidate vetted and endorsed by the Liberal Party was finally abandoned after a series of historic comments on social media, comparing homosexuality to incest and necrophilia , and labeling it a “perversion.” ” under a post about conversion practices – came to light.

I’m looking forward to our visit to Maryborough in Queensland, where a brutal murder in 2008 sparked a campaign to end the so-called “gay panic” defense, which essentially meant that a “homosexual insinuation” could justify murder. It took nine years for the state parliament to remove this barbaric provision.

We’re also off to Rockhampton in central Queensland, about 45 minutes from my childhood hometown, where some bookstores initially refused to carry Fourteen because of its contents.

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Of course, as we learned this week, these attitudes are not limited to regional and rural Australia. Take Canberra, where the show travels this week and where some of our elected officials are now lobbying for a so-called religious freedom bill. If legislated, it could allow schools to fire queer teachers, nursing homes to expel queer residents, and devout pharmacists to refuse medications to queer clients based on religious beliefs.

We returned to Brisbane in June, where we performed Fourteen for the first time, and where a dear friend’s son faced relentless bullying about his identity at his school in an affluent inner suburb, and received little support. He took his own life in January. He was 14 years old.

I am incredibly grateful for the great strides we have made as a society, as a country, over many painful decades. That progress was much achieved, and those who benefited – like me – did so at the expense and thanks to the sacrifices of countless defenders.

I’m married, I have a daughter, and I’ve built a wonderful career in an industry where being gay isn’t such an issue that I sometimes forget I am. But if I hadn’t escaped that city (heck, if I’d lived 40 minutes further west), who knows where I’d be?

For all the Passion Pop and S Club 7 choreography you’ll see at Fourteen, not all history is ancient history. There is still an undercurrent of fear and hatred, both in our cities and in our regions, in politics and in schools.

We have come so far. But we still have a long way to go.