17 - Queering Mateship

Summary

David Malouf and Christos Tsiolkas represent very different generations of gay men with migrant backgrounds, but both use the novel form as a way of articulating gay experience. Malouf, born 1934, started out as a poet, and continued to publish poetry for his entire career. His work is exquisitely styled and highly verbally self-conscious. As opposed to the meditative, scholarly Malouf, Tsiolkas, born 1965, is far grittier and rancorous in his approach. Loaded (1995) details a world of drug use and casual sex, whereas Dead Europe (2005) overturns the traditional Australian nostalgia for and even pretention about continental Europe by examining its sordid post-Cold War reality. Though Malouf and Tsiolkas are very different writers, their concern with aesthetics, history, and what it might be to live in a community make their juxtaposition not just heuristic but inevitable. This chapter explores one convergence between them: their queering of mateship.