Compelling story of love and the tragedy of AIDS | Holding the Man

HOLDING THE MAN | Holding the Man | Timothy Conigrave, Tommy Murphy

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	• Holding the Man Timothy Conigrave, Tommy Murphy Nick Hern Books, 2010 - 96 pages average customer review:based on 56 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Stays with you for a long time

I was browsing through Amazon and came across this book. I read it in the late 90s. I remember it as very raw and beautiful, and I remember sobbing in a way that I have done for maybe 2 other books in my life. I haven't forgotten how much it moved me.

Compelling story of love and the tragedy of AIDS

One of the best books I've read about gay life during the eighties and nineties. Timothy Conigrave's well-written autobiography tracks his life from coming out through to the death, from AIDS-related illness, of his partner, John. I found it very moving and very hard to put down. So glad to have this on my bookshelf!

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HOLDING THE MAN

If you haven't read or heard of this book, please do yourself a favor and get your hands on a copy immediately! This autobiographical novel and winner of the 1995 Human Rights Award is a triumphant, tragic, inspiring, liberating, heartbreaking masterpiece! This all-too-real and honest book tells Tim's story, of how he fell in love with John, the captain of the football team in high school ("holding the man" is an expression used in Australian Rules Football), and how their love went through good times and bad as they explored their sexuality until ultimately tragedy entered their world. When I finished reading this book I was at the beach and thankfully wearing sunglasses--I had to race into the surf to wash my sobbing tears away. Whatever book is next on your "to be read" list, make it second on the pile and read this book first. You won't regret it!

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WOW

I think my title says it all. GET THIS BOOK! Conigrave does an amazing job and bears his soul in this incredible and inspiring book. If there is on book I can think of that all GLBT's should read, it is this one. The way Timothy gives it all for the reader from his childhood to his coming out, and the heart wrenching death of his partner, you will laugh and cry your way to the end and find it hard to put this amazing book down!

An honest and haunting memoir of discovery, love, and tragedy.

All lives are lived through a particular set of circumstances and are bound by time, place, and fate. However familiar or strange that context may seem, a successful memoir allows us to learn--ever so intimately--what it was like to experience the trajectory of a particular life, almost as though we had lived it ourselves. This is the beauty and strength of Tim Conigrave's "Holding the Man."

As a nine-year-old schoolboy in the late 1960's near Melbourne, Australia, Conigrave is growing up with "a head full of boys" as his gay identity starts to emerge from the flux of his friends and schoolmates. When he enters high school, he is mesmerized by a boy named John Caleo, a beautiful boy with long eyelashes who is captain of the football team. After a furtive period of trying to get John's attention, Conigrave invites him to his house for dinner. By evidence of the lack of resistance as he courts John, Conigrave eventually calls John up and asks, "John Caleo, will you go round with me?" which is an invitation to "go steady." Caleo responds with a single word, "Yep." Thus, a relationship is born where Conigrave and Caleo will be lovers for the rest of their lives.

The remainder of the memoir follows the couple through the emergence of the other aspects of their lives: college and gay activism, friends, career, and the tragedy of landing, in young adulthood, in the emerging AIDS epidemic.

Conigrave is nothing if not frank which provides strength to his story, even if--at times--he may veer toward too much explicitness with sex and the particular manifestations of illness, at least for some readers. Nothing is left to the imagination.

But what does shine through in this account is the courage and devotion Tim and John showed as they insisted on their relationship over the objection of disapproving family members. Even more moving is the tenderness, intimacy, and love between these two men which could only have arisen from the specter of profound loss. This is a powerful story that you will not soon forget.

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The course of teenage love rarely runs smooth, but it is a white-water adventure if you are a gay boy in an all-male school in 1970s Melbourne with a crush on the captain of the football team. Still, despite the odds, Tim and John become close and for fifteen years their relationship survives everything life throws at it - the separations, the discriminations, the temptations, the jealousies and the losses - until the only problem that love can't solve turns up to part them. "Holding the Man" has become one of the most successful Australian stage productions in recent years, breaking box office records, achieving a total of 4 sell out seasons in Sydney, and collecting numerous awards including 2007 NSW Premier's Literary Award for Best Play, the 2007 AWGIE for Best Play and the Philip Parsons Award.

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