Coming back home

‘To write a good story, you have to bleed a little.’

– William Yang

‘When I think about your work, the message I get from it is about coming back home.’ These were my first words to William when we caught up on Zoom. He joined me from his home office, his face lit naturally by the sun. Behind him, tucked neatly into orange Agfa boxes, were his decades-long bodies of work.

As a fellow artist, William’s work taught me the value of using your own lived experience as a form of philosophy. Through his storytelling and writing, he adds depth in his quest to highlight the humanity in all of us. I thought it was only apt that I discuss his work through a similar style.

Each with a cup of tea in hand, we talked about the National Gallery of Victoria’s (NGV) collection of his work,¹National Gallery of Victoria, NGV, Victorian Government, ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/artist/24872, accessed 15 Oct., 2021. the challenges of growing up in a multicultural household, his coming out stories, the meanings of death in two types of families, and the power inherent in valuing your own story.

William Yang is a highly respected image-maker and performer. He’s a household name among his generation of queers, and one of the most important documentarians of Australian queer history. He was born in the Atherton Tablelands of North Queensland in 1943 and later moved to Meanjin (Brisbane), to study architecture at the University of Queensland. Through his study, he developed a love of theatre and learnt how to paint with light.

In 1969, he was seduced by Sydney’s bustling camp culture. He took portraits of the ‘who’s who’ of Eora Nation (Sydney), documenting the city’s relationship with its queer inhabitants. His images reveal evolving artist circles, the marks of community resistance, and dance floors covered in sweat and cum, topped with the whiff of poppers.

Alongside these salacious evenings, he chronicled a dark plague with which many of us still share our beds with: the plight of HIV/AIDS. He also poured himself into tracing his family’s painful past, reclaiming his own cultural history in a process that would eventually lead him to ‘come out as Chinese’.

As we engage with William’s unique method²Benjamin Law, Seeing and Being Seen, Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2021, pp. 33–42. of storytelling, we observe a man rediscovering himself. His photographs reveal the celebration and resilience of our community, and his performances capture the plurality of our existence. Ultimately, his work highlights the humanity in all of us. To him, no one is ‘the other’.

As an HIV-positive, queer and transgender-fluid Filipino-Australian, my own art practice³Emil Cañita, Babydilfx, instagram.com/babydilfx, accessed 27 Oct. 2021. has been profoundly inspired by William’s construction of queer relationships in his work and photographic practice.

While preparing to write this piece for the queer edition of the NGV’s Art Journal, I spent my weekends watching – in tears – William’s performances online.⁴Tony Ayres, ‘Sadness: a portrait of photographer William Yang’, Kanopy, www.kanopy.com/product/sadness-portrait-photographer-william-yang, accessed 11 Aug. 2021; and Martin Fox, ‘Friends of Dorothy’, Vimeo, vimeo.com/ondemand/williamyangfod, accessed 9 Aug. 2021. I trawled through archives of his work, reading a couple of his monographs (Friends of Dorothy,⁵William Yang, Friends of Dorothy, Pan Macmillian, Sydney, 1997. Seeing and Being Seen),⁶Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Seeing and Being Seen, Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2021. and reading articles⁷John McDonald, ‘Devastating and intimate: the landmark photos that stop viewers in their tracks’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 Apr. 2021, www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/why-you-can-identify-with-the-story-of-photographer-william-yang-20210329-p57ez5.html, accessed 12 Oct. 2021; Peter Wilkings, ‘Review: William Yang’s Blood Links at Canberra Theatre an engrossing story of family’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 Apr. 2016, www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/review-william-yangs-blood-links-at-canberra-theatre-an-engrossing-story-of-family-20160413-go5kv7.html, accessed 12 Oct. 2021. written about him, eager to understand how others⁸Marcus Bunyan, ‘Review: “William Yang: seeing and being seen” at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Brisbane, 15 Aug. 2021, artblart.com/2021/08/15/review-william-yang-seeing-and-being-seen-at-the-queensland-art-gallery-gallery-of-modern-art-goma-brisbane/, accessed 12 Oct. 2021; Gina Fairley, ‘Exhibition review: William Yang, Seeing and Being Seen, QAG’, ArtsHub, 31 Mar. 2021, www.artshub.com.au/news/reviews/exhibition-review-william-yang-seeing-and-being-seen-qag-262227-2370528/, accessed 12 Oct. 2021; and Chari Larsson, ‘Tenderness, desire and politics: William Yang’s work is a portrait of life well lived’, The Conversation, 7 Apr. 2021, theconversation.com/tenderness-desire-and-politics-william-yangs-work-is-a-portrait-of-a-life-well-lived-158413, accessed 12 Oct. 2021. have come to perceive him. Through my own writing, I wanted to highlight the healing power of his work.

‘Yeah, to me it feels like you’ve finally come back home’, I repeated when I spoke to him. ‘You’ve been following these different strands that you’ve sewn together over the years. You’ve left home to explore your sexuality, danced with life and death, and exposed yourself to the highs and lows of Australian queer culture. Through your cultural curiosity, you also managed to dig deep into your family’s hidden traumas, which led to another journey during which you reclaimed your cultural history. Seeing your exhibition in Queensland this year, gave me the impression that you now feel a deep sense of peace within yourself. That’s what I mean when I say it seems like you’ve come home. You’ve learned to fall in love with what makes you who you are’, I continued. ‘Does that statement resonate with you?’

William, measured by nature and now somewhat amused, replied with a small smile on his face, ‘Yes, it is about accepting yourself’.

His head rested lightly on his hand, he added, ‘When I grew up in North Queensland both my sexuality and my ethnicity were suppressed. I came out as a gay person in the early seventies in Sydney and that helped me to “come out” as Chinese twelve years later. I claimed my Chinese heritage which had previously been denied and unacknowledged. These two themes, sexuality and race run through my work, and now in my old age I’ve come to terms with them’.

‘So, tell me, what are you writing about?’ he asked.

‘Several things, actually’, I replied. ‘But I wanted to start with your works that the NGV has acquired over the years. Have you been able to see them yet?’

‘I think I have’, he said, ‘But do remind me.’

I shared the contents of my screen with him, revealing five of his prints. The first was a reflection on mortality, an image of William holding a handful of pills and supplements (Battling time, 2010). The second revealed a moment of symbolic triumph through cultural reclamation – a portrait of William in a Chinese scholar’s costume (William in scholar’s costume, 2008). The third and fourth together reflected his growth, one taken when he was a child (Self Portrait #2, 2007), another more recently (Self Portrait #5, 2008), and the final image was one of William, newly graduated from the University of Queensland, sitting with his parents in their house in Graceville, Queensland (William, Father, Mother, Graceville, Brisbane, 1974).

‘Well, that’s not bad’, William remarked, seemingly satisfied.

‘I was quite surprised when I learnt that they don’t have any of your more explicitly queer work: the portraits of your lovers, the early heydays of Mardi Gras, the club nights you documented, balls of all kinds … Where’s the debauchery?’ I asked, my tone indignant.

‘Yes’, he said. ‘The sexy stuff.’

‘Yeah, there’s no sexy stuff!’

When we stopped laughing, I added, ‘Well, I find it strange that none of it’s there. Because when I think about it, you are the sexy man. You’re all about the sexy stuff!’.

Reflecting on his career portraying Australia’s queer subcultures, William noted, ‘When I first showed some of my gay works at the Australian Centre for Photography in 1977, it was considered quite controversial at the time. I think a lot of these attitudes still exist today.

‘When I did have my sexier works acquired by institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art or the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the nineties, it was usually because there was someone from our community there to support the acquisition of the works.’

He added, ‘I think a lot of art institutions just didn’t want to collect gay works that were too explicit in fear of how the public world react or how it might affect their funding’.

‘Even in the past decade of NGV acquiring my work’, William noted, ‘they haven’t chosen any of my gay themed works even though I’ve been creating them for almost half a century’.

Although William’s queerness is inherent in his practice, when you only have access to his work focusing on his cultural heritage, his family, his relationship with his own mortality, this essential part of his identity can be easily missed.

As a queer person, seeing this other side to his work: our salacious dance floors, our countless lovers, our seemingly never-ending rallies, our shared trauma, validates my existence and reminds me of our community’s resilience in a country that’s long persecuted our existence.

It takes an immense amount of creativity to keep oneself alive when it feels like you’re at a constant state of oppression. Through William’s eyes, he reminds us that our lives are works of art.

*

One of the first images I ever saw by William is a portrait of one of his lovers, Joe, taken in 1979. In it, Joe is curled in his bed, facing away from the camera.

For this work, William wrote:

‘We had strong eye contact right from the start and I thought I had a good chance. The music was loud so I leant over to shout my opening line. He pointed to his ears and he shook his head and I understood that he was deaf. He wrote words and parts of the alphabet on the palm of his hand. J.O.E. Joe! It was totally vivid. I’ll never forget it. He brought me a drink. We didn’t have small talk so things developed really fast. I made the shape of a house with my hands: the walls, a hip roof and I pointed to myself. Did he want to come home with me? He agreed and we embraced, a bit awkwardly just to confirm that our intentions were similar. The ride home in the taxi was silent. No need to talk. It was perfect. Later I found out he was a labourer from a nearby country town. He sometimes came to the city where he had friends. He was a bit shy in bed but I liked him. I took his photo in the morning. He couldn’t hear the click. It was like photographing a stone. After breakfast I put him in a taxi. I worried how he would tell the driver he wanted to go, but I guess that was something he solved before’.

I was in my late teens when I came across William’s work and, after seeing it, I felt a deep sense of emancipation.

Growing up Asian in Australia had come with its own set of challenging intersections. There are the difficulties of cross-cultural existence and attempting to marry the expectations of family with those of the world outside your door. Then there’s the self-loathing – at times a denial of one’s self – that arises when surrounded by an almost exclusively white media. There is constant exposure to images and realities that hide, deny, or devalue your existence. Recent coverage, in relation to COVID-19, revealed a rise in hatred towards Asian people once again.⁹Samuel Yang, ‘COVID-19 exacerbates existing racial hatred experienced by Australian Asian communities, report finds’, ABC News, www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-23/covid-19-racism-australia-report-racial-hatred-pandemic/100316184?, accessed 12 Oct. 2021.

Being queer as well as Asian, there are other imperatives. I can’t overemphasise the extent of the difficulties in coming out, and the number of my peers – myself included – who lost their homes as a result of being honest about ourselves at a very young age.¹⁰Ruth Mcnair, Cal Andrews, Sharon Parkinson & Deborah Dempsey, ‘LGBTQ Homeless: Risks, Resilience, and Access to Services in Victoria’, LGBTI Homeless, www.lgbtihomeless.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/LGBTQ-Homelessness-project-Final-report-September-2017-Final_.pdf, accessed 12 Oct. 2021. There’s also the stereotyping of the Asian body in porn culture that renders us either submissive, exploited or asexual.¹¹Tan Hoang Nguyen, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation, Duke University Press, North Carolina, USA, 2014.

Without the right support, growing up queer and Asian in Australia can mean assimilating into a culture of self-hate. Which is why, when I saw William’s work for the very first time, I thought, ‘Finally. There’s me’. A person of value. A person with agency.

William’s power lies in his ability to expand our understanding of ourselves by documenting a culture many of us didn’t think we could be a part of. Growing up in a country where genuine representation of queer and Asian lives is seldom, William’s implied presence in his photography – and the centrality of his voice in his performance work – introduce nuance and soul to Australia’s otherwise homogenised perception of our lives.

*

As we directed our attention back to the NGV’s collection of his work, William remarked, ‘I think it’s a nice selection of stuff. But there’s a whole area of my work, which the Queer exhibition is about, that they don’t have. So they’ve picked one, William in scholar’s costume, as slightly queer in context. Perhaps that’s the closest we can get to something queer [here], because I’m likening coming out as gay to a similar process of liberation from racial suppression’.

The text reads: ‘I learned Taoism, a Chinese philosophy, and this led me to embracing my Chinese heritage which hitherto had been denied and unacknowledged. People at that time called me Born Again Chinese, and that’s not a bad description as there was a certain zealousness to the process. But now I see it as liberation from racial suppression and prefer to say ‘I came out’ as a Chinese’.

Triumphantly he added, ‘This work is about me liberating myself from racial suppression. Which is cultural, since it’s happening in Australia. And it’s also about me liberating myself from the attitudes of my family, because they wanted me to assimilate and to deny my Chinese heritage. This photo represents a big milestone for me: [it’s about] discovering a part of my cultural history, and I’ve claimed [that]’.

I brought Portrait #2 up on both of our screens at this point – a photo of William as a child. On his shirt, he wears the account of his first experience of being bullied because of his race. Unaware of his own cultural heritage at the time, William returned home from school that day and asked his mother if he was Chinese. ‘Yes, you are’, she replied. William’s handwritten recollection continues, ‘Her tone was hard and it shocked me. I knew in this moment being Chinese was like a terrible curse and I could not rely on my mother for help’.

The text reads: ‘When I was about six years old one of the kids at school called me “Ching Chong China man, Born in a jar, christened in a teapot, Ha Ha Ha”. I had no idea what he was talking about but I knew from his expression that he was being horrible to me, so I went home to my mother and I said to her, “Mum, I’m not Chinese am I?” My mother said to me very sternly, “Yes you are”. Her tone was hard and it shocked me. I knew in this moment being Chinese was was a like terrible curse and I could not rely on my mother for help. Or my brother who was four years older than me, very much more experienced in the world. He chimed in, “And you’d better get used to it” ’.

Fighting suppression, and the culture that supports it is, is one of the central aims of William’s voice. Speaking with Rosie Hays, the curator of his recent major exhibition Seeing and Being Seen at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (2021), William said, ‘My mother thought being Chinese was a complete liability, and she wanted us to be more Australian than the Australians. So, the Chinese part of me was completely denied and unacknowledged until I was in my mid-thirties, when I became Taoist’.¹²Rosie Hays, Seeing and Being Seen, Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2021, p. 18–29.

Guided by his spirituality, William was among a diverse group of Australian artists who represented our multicultural lives in various art forms throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. He travelled across Australia, from our so-called ‘outback’ to the sprawls of communities in our major cities, and documented the legacy of the Chinese in Australia.

*

In one of his books entitled Friends of Dorothy, which holds the genesis of William’s adventures in Sydney, he states, ‘I don’t think I ever consciously made a decision to come out. I was swept along by the tidal wave of change at the time’.

When I read this statement back to him, he remarked, ‘I came out as a gay man without thinking of any consequences. The gay movement was a revolution. It felt like there was no alternative for me’.

‘And what about being an artist?’ I asked him. ‘When did you come out as an artist?’

‘I knew for a long time I wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t know how to make a living out of it’, he said. ‘That photo of me with my parents in NGV’s collection, William, Father, Mother, Graceville, Brisbane, talks about me finishing my architecture degree and dropping out of the workforce. My parents weren’t happy with my decision. There was a lot of tension during that time.’

After a slight pause, he continued, ‘That was just the beginning of the struggle for me. I struggled for fifteen years as a freelance photographer before I “found myself”, you could say’.

‘Where did the performance aspect of your work come in?’ I asked him.

‘I have always liked theatre, even before I came out as a gay man. As an undergraduate, I used to direct the architecture reviews, and that’s how I came to love theatre. So, when I came to Sydney, I worked in experimental theatre. But I found that I couldn’t make a living out of it. That’s when I started to do photography, and found out that I could make a living out of it.’

‘Like I said before’, he added. ‘I struggled a lot during those years, and because I was so busy, I wasn’t able to make any work for the theatre. It was only towards the end of my life as a freelance photographer that I discovered this unique form of presenting my story. I started to do slide projection, and I talked with the slides, and that became the performance. After I had done the performance, I then produced the images to go on the gallery walls as an exhibition. That’s when the writing on the photographs started.’

Sensing his introverted nature, I asked what it was like for him to be on the other side of the camera.

‘It’s been an evolution’, he said. ‘I felt so awkward coming out from behind the camera that I had a panic attack before the curtain came up the first time I performed in a theatre. But after performing a number of times, I got used to talking in public. I realised that I was the glue that held the story together, that half of the performance was the photos, and that I was the rest of it. I was integral to the whole piece. Because of this, I became less shy about performing and revealing my thoughts and experiences to an audience. Eventually I came to realise that this disclosure is the essence of storytelling and to tell a good story you have to bleed a little.’

‘It sounds like you really “found yourself” ’, I said, confirming his earlier remark.

‘Yes, it was one of the ways I found myself. My performance has been my most successful aspect of my work. I started to do my performance pieces in 1989. A few years later, in 1992, I performed Sadness, which toured around the world. I found out that I could earn enough money from my own work, and that I didn’t have to do any freelance work at all. So I stopped doing freelance work, and then I became more productive. I wasn’t using my energy to do stuff for other people. Everything I did then fed into the different themes that I was trying to explore.’

*

Life and death are major themes in William’s practice. In Sadness, 1992, William explores unresolved grief by retelling the loss of his ‘gay family’ to AIDS: Peter Tully, David McDiarmid, Nicolass, Scotty, and a former lover named Allan. He intersperses this with his journey to North Queensland, which he makes in a quest to unravel the story behind the 1922 murder of his uncle, William Fang Yuen.

As part of Sadness, William produced nineteen gelatin-silver photographs with captions that tell of Allan’s slow and painful submission to AIDS.

The text reads: ‘I hadn’t seen Alan for about three years. I lost contact with him when he moved to Melbourne. I heard that he was back in Sydney. I heard that he was sick. I was in Ward 17 of St. Vincent’s Hospital, that’s the AIDS ward, visiting someone else, when I looked through one of the doors and I saw Allan and I recognised him immediately… but he had changed. He seemed like an old man and I had strong desire to burst into tears’.

‘I get emotional whenever I see that series’, I told William.

In Sadness, William highlights the human in HIV. As someone who lives with HIV, I am met with a mixture of sadness and gratitude that my reality is far from what William and his ‘gay family’ had to go through forty years ago.

Talking to my queer elders about this, they recall the level of stigma and discrimination that people living with HIV experienced during that time. ‘It was used as an opportunity for bigots to fuel the homophobia in our communities’, said one person. ‘They moralised the disease and turned the general population against our communities.’

Many of those with HIV were treated like biblical lepers, disowned by their families and communities. Back then, first lines of treatment like AZT made most people sick. Some opted to go off treatment, allowing the virus to take its course.

‘It felt like I went to a funeral every week back then’, said one elder among countless others with similar memories of the time.

In Australia, a lot of things have changed since then. We now have an antiretroviral treatment that can maintain an extremely low level of HIV in your body. I recall my doctor describing it to me as being ‘functionally cured’ the day I went in and grabbed my first three months of treatment.

‘It means the treatment you’re on stops HIV from being passed onto another person. You’re non-infectious’, she said. With a single, daily pill, people living with HIV can now live a normal length of life, conceive children and live however they want.

Earlier this year, I came across someone who was ninety-four years of age and living with HIV. ‘Wow’, I thought to myself. ‘We really have come a long way.’

*

In the parts of Sadness that focus on his uncle’s murder, William describes Fang Yuen as a rich man who owned several cane fields in Mourilyan, North Queensland. In 1922, one of Fang Yuen’s managers, a white Russian named Peter Danelchenko, murdered him after an argument over the proper weight of cane that went to the mills.

‘Fang Yuen accused Danelchenko of cooking the books’, William speculated. But during the subsequent trial, Danelchenko was acquitted of first-degree murder.

‘Sixty-eight years later I talked to many of my relatives about Fang Yuen’s death’, William said. ‘Everyone had a different story.’ And when he tried to put all of them together, he said, ‘They didn’t make sense. But there was one thing they all agreed on and it was this: the Chinese at the time were very upset about the outcome of the trial. They thought it was a miscarriage of justice’.

This miscarriage, William realised, was the main cause of cultural and racial suppression in his family. ‘I think it was very traumatic for my mother’, William noted. ‘And she put it out of her mind completely. She literally blotted it out.’ It was an event that equated being Chinese with being someone who didn’t deserve any justice. The event went further than killing a family member, it also took away their cultural pride.

William recounted how, standing in the place where his Uncle Fang Yuen was shot, he was able to understand the source of his family’s pain. ‘That’s when everything started to make sense for me’, William explained, taking another sip from his cup of tea.

‘It must have been quite cathartic’, I replied.

‘Yes, it was’, he said. ‘You know, catharsis is a Greek theatrical term. For me, it carries a meaning of ritual healing. Once you have the text and the incantation, and you speak it, that becomes the healing process.’

Emil Cañita is a Filipino-Australian artist and storyteller based in Naarm.

Notes