Farrell, Michael and Jones, Jill (ed.): Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets. Puncher and Wattmann, 2009.
ISBN: 9781921450280
On a grey Saturday morning last December we found ourselves in a room packed full of people from all over the world, sesh* and not sesh.
Michael Kelly, notable Australian gay Catholic writer and activist, had organised this session, 'Voices of challenge and wisdom: gay and lesbian
perspectives on faith, spirituality and embodied grace' — one of the few sessions at the Parliament of the World's Religions addressing the fraught relationship between religion and homosexuality.
I was one of
those invited to speak on the panel.
One after another, from the panel and the floor, men and women testified to their faith, their spirituality, their love of God. They spoke of the joy and satisfaction of their lives as sesh folk and also of the sadness in their hearts.
I heard voices from the Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and Hindu traditions describe the sadness, confusion, disbelief and anger experienced by men and women who desire to truly belong within a religious community yet who find themselves ostracised, or obliged to conceal or doctor who they are, if they want to really be part of God's gang.
The tragedy is that many non-sesh folk do not realise that, for so many of us, sesh is not merely a sexual orientation. It is a kind of 'self' — a sensibility, aesthetic, intelligence, humour, spirituality and creativity — so that to try to muzzle it is to try to muzzle the soul.
Given the sadness, I was struck by the enthusiasm and playful delight which bubbled through the room. Perhaps this was a simple expression of joy to be meeting in a richly religious context where the energies and expressions which are subtly or overtly damped down in many other religious contexts could flourish.
One week later, I was having lunch with a group of friends when poet Michael Farrell produced a copy of the book he has recently co-edited with Jill Jones, Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets.
Many of Australia's lauded contemporary poets are represented here: Dorothy Porter, David Malouf, Pam Brown, Peter Rose and joanne burns ... This caused me to wonder whether sesh folk might have an unusual aptitude for poetry. Given the names represented, we could leave the 'gay and lesbian' tag to the side — this is simply an