I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but one morning, I think it was the morning after I’d been out to blow off a little steam at the sauna, the missing swimmer was finally OUTed. I was wondering when it would come. I mean, it’s not that I’ve got a finely tuned gaydar or anything. I’m usually clueless. But even I was adding up the circumstantial evidence myself during the previous week and coming up with gay gay gay.
Firstly, Matt Gray disappeared from the Prahran pool so right away the odds are up. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this was case closed, but the odds are stacked a bit higher at that location than your usual one in ten. This was even hinted to Mr and Mrs Suburbia with ‘I saw him but he’s not my type’, quoted, remember, without further comment, in one of the first few articles about the missing swimmer.
Then there was the press conference that the family had done a day or two after he went missing. This was the usual deal, with the family pleading with the public at large, and with Matt if he was watching, to come home, be safe, etc, followed by a few questions. The footage was used very briefly on every major news broadcast that day but nothing very extraordinary was revealed, except perhaps for the fact that alongside Matt’s tearful Mum, stoic Dad and pretty but conventional looking sister (how Australian it all was) was a man who looked a little like the food guy from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, smartly groomed with rimless glasses. You know the type. This man could have been another member of the family, Matt’s brother perhaps, although he didn’t look anything like either Matt or the rest of the family. But I didn’t think he was another family member. It was something about the way he was referenced by name, Kevin, but never by relationship to the missing swimmer. Talking about the one in ten rule, I bet more than one in ten people watching the press conference asked the question, Who’s the guy on the end? But the implications were clear, Kevin was Matt’s partner.
Perhaps they didn’t know what to call him and so opted for calling him nothing at all. I can kind of understand the thinking behind that, but how horrible to reduce him to some kind of hired-mourner character. Surely if they weren’t comfortable with husband or boyfriend, they could have just gone with the non-threatening ‘partner’ or even, if they wanted to get a bit racy, ‘life partner’. Perhaps they didn’t want to highlight the fact that Matt was gay and that Kevin was his partner, because it was considered off the point, maybe, not really relevant; or perhaps because it seemed a little too sensational when they were dealing with very upset people. I suppose often the safest option for the media regarding gay relationships seems to be the don’t ask, don’t tell, no need to mention it mentality.
The point is I was already well and truly there when the headlines trumpeted that the missing swimmer was a poofter. And trumpet they did. What’s the point of outing a missing swimmer who has inexplicably caught the attention of the public, unless you can do it like this: GAY SWIMMER STILL MISSING. Pats on the back all round on a job well and subtly done guys. Is the story that he’s still missing, or is the story that he’s gay? The latter. Obviously. In fact, there was no new news about the disappearance at all. A police spokesperson said a few words along the lines that they were ‘following up a number of leads’ (unspecified) and appealed for anyone with any information about Matt’s disappearance to come forward. That was it. No, the point of the story seemed to be primarily that Matt was gay and that the well-groomed Queer Eye looking guy at the press conference was his partner. He was finally given that title, officially, in the article.
The interview, such as it was, with Kevin was quite a disappointment. For a start he didn’t have anything particularly gay to say, which I’m sure disappointed the journo just as it did the public. In fact, the life that Matt and Kevin appeared to live before Matt’s disappearance was hardly a Mardi Gras parade. Don’t get me wrong, I know not every gay life is all drag queens and rainbow flags, but that headline, you know, it kind of promised more. At least a glory hole or two.
Kevin came across in the article as a nice, simple, heartbroken man. He was quietly spoken, I presumed, his answers to the questions being considered and short. He was an engineer. He and Matt had been together for 15 years, had met at university, travelled together a little, then returned to Melbourne to ‘settle down’, mortgaged themselves to the eyeballs in a suburban dream/nightmare in the gay heartland of Prahran.
Matt was, Kevin said, hard-working and ‘law-abiding’. Yes, he really said that. So I guess Matt didn’t speed or, you know, jaywalk or anything. He was also, Kevin said, generally of a positive and easy-going nature. And of course he loved swimming his laps. He would get home from work, walk through the park at the rear of their property, then zig-zag through another couple of streets to the Prahran pool. Almost every day he would do his laps and would swim up to 1.5 km a time. He had some mates he used to go swimming with, but mostly just went by himself. It was, Kevin said, a solitary pleasure to him.
In short, all in the garden was lovely, a bit boring, and definitely, somehow disappointingly, not ‘gay’ in any spectacular way, but lovely nonetheless. In fact, Kevin was photographed for the article in his own front garden and behind him you could actually see a picket fence and a 4WD. The whole picture screamed inner suburb sophisticate at me.
As for the disappearance, Kevin said that he couldn’t understand what had happened, but that he didn’t believe Matt would voluntarily leave his life and his loved ones, would just walk away like this without word, without explanation. Matt was quite close to his family and especially his sister’s kids. Nor did Kevin think Matt could have been overwhelmed or abducted by a third party. He was a fit young man, and alert, and he disappeared from a busy public place in the middle of the afternoon.
So what did Kevin think had happened?
Disappointingly, and quite stupidly I think, Kevin said he thought there must have been an ‘accident’ or a ‘mistake or something’. It seemed a pathetic head-in-the-sand thing to say, but I thought I knew where it came from, and felt sad for him.
In any case, the end result of the article was a lot of not very much. The most important thing that came out was a real sense of Kevin’s affection for Matt, and a real sense of quiet, dignified sorrow at his disappearance. Also, the fact that Kevin who was presumably closest to Matt had no idea what had happened to him made the whole disappearance even more mysterious, more final.
Oh, by the way, at the same time as all this, the Prahran pool was also ‘outed’ as having a ‘largely gay clientele’, which I thought was hilarious. As well as not being news in any meaning of the word.
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New Year’s Eve I stayed in. Surprise surprise. There were fireworks, two lots actually, one above the Yarra and another right there in the Docklands. It was a bit funny considering the state of the browned-out sky not a week or so before. But the fireworks and the celebrations down below Sharon’s Place made my situation feel a whole lot more shitful, in the way that little treats and niceties can make hardship seem harder. I mean, I didn’t feel as hopeless as I did in the brown-sky days, and yet perversely I found myself thinking back to those days and how easy they were in hindsight. I lay down but I couldn’t go to sleep, I made myself a sandwich but then didn’t feel hungry, I ran a bath and couldn’t be bothered sitting in it for more than five minutes, and then suddenly the idea of staying inside when everyone else was out with sparklers, drinking champagne and