Story Club: David Marr Opens Up About Being A Married Gay Man In The ’70s

Story Club is a monthly live event held at Giant Dwarf Theatre, where Australia’s finest raconteurs — politicians, comics, writers, commentators and musicians — tell the audience a story based on that month’s theme.

To celebrate the launch of their brand new podcast, they’ve shared with us the transcript of a tale told by award-winning journalist, commentator and author David Marr at the February event, themed ‘A House of Cards’. You can listen to the podcast here; an audio version of Marr’s story is embedded below.

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Five Hundred ruined my marriage. You might think there were more fundamental issues in play. But I knew then and know now that they were manageable. We could have gone on despite me being … not really built for matrimony. But cards brought us undone.

Forgive me, as Sarah Ferguson says on the 7.30 Report. Forgive me for taking the theme so literally. But after a lifetime at Fairfax I can’t come at any subject in an original way. Fairfax employed skilled teams of subeditors to beat originality out of us and they did their work well.

So when I was asked to “tell a true story on the theme of A House of Cards,” I had no choice but take the subject head-on – and tell the story about the destruction of my marriage, how a union meant for life was brought undone by my wife’s passion for Five Hundred.

Young people today grow up in a world where they expect gay men to pair off, dance once or twice at Mardi Gras, get a dog and save for house on Scotland Island. It seems the natural order of things.

But there was a time when being married – to a woman – was a perfectly respectable way for gay men to live. Even quite admirable. Their families loved it. The community applauded. Role models were everywhere back then and aren’t too hard to find even now – in history, in Hollywood and federal politics.

The truth – overlooked in these impatient times – is that ambitious gay men make splendid husbands. They have careers, children, rather stocky wives and the occasional lifesaver on the side. But splendid husbands.

I was determined to be one of those.

First I needed to have sex. Like so many young Australian men at that time I waited till I got to London. Foreign ground. No family. No relatives. What followed was a tale of two suburbs: Notting Hill, first time with a man. Willesden Green, first time with a woman.

I like to think my sweet fumbling affair with ginger-haired Gavin in 1972 is part of the erotic substrata that made Notting Hill a natural setting for the films of Hugh Grant in the 1990s.

Perhaps I should have stuck with Notting Hill instead of switching to the Jubilee Line – two changes, as it happens, Edgeware Road and Baker Street – to make a risky appointment with fate in Willesden Green.

I know this sort of audience at this sort of event craves grubby detail. I am going to be relatively discreet and merely report that on an unstable night-and-day in a second floor flat in that plain suburb I proved I could do it.

And I was terribly pleased with myself.

And what a high-minded coupling it was. Having done it once or twice and a few times more, I felt – we felt – we must hurry home and take our part in building a new Australia under Gough Whitlam.

I can see now that the rickety structure of my marriage was built on optimism, patriotism, blind faith in the Labor Party, my affection for Jennie which has survived everything to this day; and masculine pride. I left Australia a terrified pro-poofter and returned a man.

We were a couple and we settled in the bosom of the heterosexual left: Balmain.

So determined was I that our marriage was going to work, I ignored all the omens. The collapse of the Whitlam government should have been a warning. Foolishly I took it then to have only national repercussions.

From time to time I was ambushed by erotic delirium like the night at the Nimrod when Andrew Sharp kissed Tony Sheldon in Peter Kenna’s A Hard God. Let me tell you, in 1974 that kiss was quite something.

I drank that away. Drink was frankly helpful. If you were scared to go to bed, a few drinks made anything possible – usually sleep.

Keeping busy was the key. We were both busy: busy, busy, busy. Lots of work. Lots of friends. Lots of cooking, and weekends away in guesthouses in the Blue Mountains. The ‘Seventies was the era of chic guesthouses: great food, icy bedrooms and a dunny down the hall. We couldn’t get enough of the discomfort.

And we were happy. Sex was … okay. The future looked bright but something began to come between us. My wife had a passion I couldn’t share: cards. She wanted to play more and more.

Soon she wasn’t satisfied unless she’d had a few hands two or three times a week. When I claimed to be too busy, too tired, a bit down in the dumps tonight – she insisted I play.

I never approached a game with enthusiasm. I never picked up the cards with pleasure. And I never won.

I asked Jennie the other day to remind me why she was so good at the game. “Don’t you remember,” she replied a little tartly. “Because I was too young for university they made me repeat the matric at Brighton Grammar and I spent most of the year playing Five Hundred.”

I did remember — once she reminded me. But then I’ve put so many of these details out of my mind. Even thinking about cards after all these years gives me a flush of humiliation. Some failures you never live down.

Do you know Five Hundred? It’s bridge with trainer wheels. You’re dealt a heap of cards and there’s a lot of coded talk around the table and then you take turns throwing a card into the middle and someone wins a trick.

I’ve been out on the net to look at the rules again. Wikipedia takes very seriously those fiddly rules and that fucking jargon: “no-ies” and “misere” and “slams” and “going out backwards”.

The paragraph headed “Play of the Joker” brought me up with a horrible jolt. “Play of the Joker. If there is a trump suit, the joker counts as the highest trump…” And so on and so on and so on.

I always played my Joker too soon. Nothing provoked my wife’s exasperation in those increasingly unhappy years as my failure to grasp the rule of the Joker. But I liked to get it out there. What was the point of holding back? Win early. Get it over and done with. The sooner it’s played, the sooner we’re gone.

This seems to be a family thing. My mother was a bridge player. “We laughed about Pam for years,” one of her dear friends told me after the funeral. “She always played her ace too soon.”

The marriage unravelled fast once we couldn’t face each other over the card table. There was never so much reading in bed. The image I have of those last months is a dark bedroom with two people, two books and two little pools of light – as far apart as possible in a double bed.

There was misery everywhere and I was responsible. This was my mistake, my fault. We broke up. I went dancing. I rediscovered the erotic charge of kissing stubble. I found sex. And I found my partner.

He won’t remember this, but one day early on he said: “Let’s have a game of cards.” And I said, quick as a flash: “I don’t play.” And, thank God, he left it at that. It was our anniversary the other day. We’ve been together eighteen years. I know why and I’m going to stay that way.

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The inaugural Story Club podcast features David Derrick C. Brown, Kirsten Drysdale, Tommy Dassalo, and Zoe Norton Lodge; from here on out, there will be one new story released every week. Subscribe here.

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Story Club happens monthly at Giant Dwarf in Redfern. For their next event, ‘Your Turn’, the tables are turned on the audience, as eight punters tell their own favourite stories. Click here for details.