Gay: the tenth anniversary collection

Julia, Kevin, Tony, Malcolm: whatever their private thoughts on the matter, in 2011 all were adamant that individuals with matching genitalia and sock drawers be barred from getting married.

In the 10 years since I penned the original essays in this book, some discriminatory laws have been fixed but, while individual states have set up their own partnership registration schemes, there’s a dirty great pothole on the road to equality in Australia: same-sex marriage.

It’s a pretty conservative desire, one would think. I’ve added several new essays to this collection on the queering of connubials.

Radical, no? Well, no.

My big hope is Carl. Carl Katter, gay brother of Queensland independent maverick and newly minted anti-gay villain Bob. So long as siblings are willing to stand up and counter the flatulent wind from Canberra then there is hope. Carl should run for Parliament. OK, there’s not a little self-interest here in a Katter double act: MP Katter in his hat looks hot. Imagine two. No?

If right-wing iconoclasts peppered the landscape in 2001, they’re positively soiling the carbon-challenged earth a decade later. Piers Akerman - see the chapter Media Gayzing - has long since lost relevance, and in his place rose the risible Andrew Bolt.

An enemy of any sort of identity politics, Bolt once penned an argument in his Melbourne (now national) newspaper column that posited he had a couple of gay friends and they didn’t want to get married and so therefore gays shouldn’t get married. I emailed his letters editor, saying: Bolt may consider these gay people his friends, but clearly he doesn’t consider them his equals.

Minutes later, Bolt emailed me directly, saying: How dare you bring my friends into this.

How very dare I indeed. But did I? Definitely no.

In the past decade I’ve been lucky enough as a Sydney-based journalist to interview some friendly, funny, talented and influential gay and gay-friendly folk for The Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun-Herald, The Age and The Sunday Age, and have included an entire section of these portraits in Gay called Gay and Gay-Friendly Arty Folk.

Inspired, no? Don’t answer that. Much like the literal title of this book, sometimes you’ve gotta tell it straight.

-Steve Dow, Sydney, November 2011

Foreword

by Christos Tsiolkas

It was purely an accident that in the same week when Steve Dow and the publishers of Gay gave me the manuscript to read, I also picked up in an op-shop, a tatty, second-hand copy of the novel City of Night by the North American Beat writer John Rechy.

I had first come across Rechy when I was 16 and I’d nervously made my way up the steep stairs of the International Bookshop in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne. The bookshop, run by a socialist co-operative, was full of texts by Marx and Lenin as well as whole shelves of books on ecology, on feminism, on anti-racism and anti-colonial struggle. The reason I’d gone into the bookshop was the word Gay on their sign outside on the street. It had literally leapt out at me, fascinating me and repelling me at the same time. Going up the stairs, I felt just like I was entering a porno shop. Once inside, I quickly ascertained where the gay books were but I was still too nervous to wander over to that section … even if the only witness was going to be the polite young bearded man behind the counter … it still felt too public a declaration of my own perversity … to be seen flicking through books meant for poofters. This was back then.

Instead, I picked up in the rich second-hand section of the bookshop a copy of John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw and, making sure that the book was safely hidden in between two other tomes, probably something Marxist, probably something from the English literary canon, I made my way to the counter and without looking at the young man, wishing I could just disappear, fearing I would only see contempt in the man’s face, I paid my money and darted out of the shop. And so began my study of sexual politics.

I was lucky.

The Sexual Outlaw was a damn fine book, with enough description of sex to keep me up at night, as well as essays on politics, on sex, and on power as understood by an author who was born into a working-class Mexican family in the United States, and who had made his way to the big cities of Los Angeles and New York to be a hustler and a writer. He tells that story in City of Night. It’s a good story, about what it’s like to be a rebel and poor and a poofter in a time when having sex with a man was illegal as well as deemed immoral, when it was clearly embedded in the economics of class and prostitution. Rechy’s writing is sometimes clumsy or lazy, but that’s the Beats for you. It’s often lyrical too, and fast and hot. That he’s not been anointed into the Beat canon could possibly have something to do with the fact that his sexuality is not sufficiently shielded by heroin use or by mystical Buddhism. Or am I just being paranoid?

City of Night was written in 1965. That’s the year I was born.

Reading Steve Dow’s book Gay I realise that 1965 is a long time ago. Dow is a journalist and the book in your hand is a very fine piece of dramatic journalist writing. That’s something we don’t have enough of in this country. Maybe that’s a residue of the colonial past. I’m all for novels, for fiction, but what you don’t get from fiction is the heady direct sense of contemporary time and space, the rush of being engaged in a dialogue or a conversation or even a fight about what matters in this mad world of politics and pop.

Reading fiction, I abstain from this world, for an hour, an evening, a week, and I enter another world, an imaginary one created by the writer. Not so when I read Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris or Mailer’s Armies of the Night. Or writing by Oriana Fallaci, Christopher Hitchens, Joan Didion or Pauline Kael. I’m swept up in the turbulence of injustice and struggle in the here-and-now when I read a great book such as Cold New Worlds, William Finnegan’s excellent and passionate piece of reportage about youth and unemployment in the United States. I can’t disappear after such a read … I have to confront the similarities to my own world, I have to confront my own prejudices and complicities. In reading the best of journalism you encounter perspectives, facts and ideas that shed light on your own life and struggles. I’m prepared to disagree, to fight over those ideas, to be moved by them and to be challenged by them. I need that from writing. Maybe at this current moment, when our magazines and newspapers in Australia are full of features on lifestyles and home decorations, full of solipsistic opinion columns, maybe we need it even more than we know.

I don’t agree with everything Dow writes … probably we don’t even agree on what the word in the book’s title means. Not precisely. But this book sketches and illuminates what homosexual life is like in Australia after more than a quarter of a century of gay rights. It’s a weird mixed-up world out there. I don’t have to ferret through a socialist bookshop to find confirmation of my sexuality any more: I can get it packaged to me by advertising and the media.

But what Dow’s book illustrates is, that though we are a long way from 1965 that doesn’t mean that the political struggles around something called sexuality have gone away. (Maybe that’s why it had to be a lefty bookshop that introduced me to gay.)

AIDS, outing, drugs, the persistent challenge of bisexuality, all of these are subjects in this book, and maybe what’s changed is that now we can see more clearly that some of the struggles, repressions and hatreds come not only from without but from within. In two chapters dealing with the hyper-masculinisation and streamlining of the male gay body, I found myself constantly asking, Why the fuck are we doing this to ourselves? But, of course, what’s important about a book like this, is being reminded that gay isn’t a niche, a segment, a ghetto cut off from the rest of society. The gay world is broader than that, an interwoven one of course, and so religion and politics and the Prime Minister and the media come in, that’s why they’re in this book, why Dow can’t not write about them.

And there are the heroes, male and female and intersex.

In a nightclub in Canberra, a drunk young woman in her early twenties explains to me why she loved Ridley Scott’s Gladiator so much. He’s a hero, man. We don’t have any fucking heroes. For me, one of the most enjoyable aspects of this book are the conversations Dow has with figures as disparate as Pauline Pantsdown, the drag persona of someone so disturbed by racism and injustice, that he created a media-savvy heroine to combat it … as David Menadue, who has been quietly battling homophobia, ignorance and the communal ravages of AIDS … and there’s Alex Karydis and Margherita Coppolino, who won’t let body-fascism and our lingering fears about disability deny them a place at Mardi Gras or in the bedroom. And Xaeviean. The heroic … as heroic as hero Ian Roberts, the actor to be.

That’s far from a small thing, giving us a taste of the heroic in the ordinary, in the day-to-day lives of people.

A favourite voice in Gay is that of a heterosexual woman who lives in the suburb where I spent my teenage years. She could have been my next-door neighbour. Discussing John Howard’s resistance to allowing lesbians and/or single women access to fertility treatments, she says, Someone should shove a dog up Howard.

See, it’s not 1965. And it’s not 1982 when I wandered red-faced up those bookshop stairs. Different neighbours, different neighbourhoods now. It’s the changes, the continuities, the breaks and the persistent discord that Gay examines and documents … and always in Dow’s honest, humane voice.

- 2001

Pre-party Prologue

WARMING UP

The air is crisp but the rain never arrives, much to the chagrin of the Reverend Fred Nile. Japanese schoolgirls line up and scream at the parade as though its participants are pop stars, and the entrepreneurial do a good line in milk crate sales. Straights seem to predominate in the crowd, girlfriends up on boyfriends’ shoulders. Does the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras make a difference, or does everyone just love a good parade?

It’s Mardi Gras 1998 and I’m standing on the edge of the kerb in Flinders Street. I’ve been here two hours and I’m rather pleased with my vantage point. Being five feet and six inches tall, this is not the easiest situation to find oneself in. The noise is building. The Dykes on Bikes are almost here. I’ve seen them before, but I’m dying to see them again.

Then he arrives. Six feet and two inches tall. Plonking his cardboard box on the ground and standing on it, he’s now six feet ten inches. Mr I’m-Here-For-The-Freak-Show-Straight-Boy. Beer in hand.

I tap him on the shoulder. He turns around.

Excuse me, I’ve been standing here for two hours.

And I do my best angry schnauzer.

I’m just testing the box, mate, he spits, and turns back.

Then, he bounces upon the balls of his feet. The box rides from side to side. And collapses.

He looks so vulnerable there in the gutter. He narrows his eyes at me. The crowd is applauding.

That’s karma for you, mate, says another – I think – straight boy. Maybe they’re not so bad after all.

It’s Mardi Gras 1999, and this time I’m in the parade. I want the Japanese schoolgirls to fawn all over me. I want Fred Nile’s menagerie of freaks to wave their placards in my face. Straight boys falling off cardboard boxes no longer get me excited.

I am a marching boy. I have arrived. I am on the right-hand side in the third of twenty rows, each four-guys wide. We have silver spray-painted crowns of thorns wedged around our heads, homemade wings on our backs, and a torch in each hand. Little white wraps around our tushes.

We’re meant to be angels, but I suspect we look like fairies. We’re marching to the song One Night in Heaven by M People.

We’ve practised this routine 263 times. Or something. You know how everyone is with estimates at Mardi Gras time. A bit silly. News reports the next day will typically quote extraordinary crowd figures, and there will always be a letter writer to The Sydney Morning Herald who will contest the figure, based on an intimate knowledge of the size of Sydney footpaths.

One post-Mardi Gras morning, I heard the news John Howard had been elected Prime Minister and I thought, Don’t be ridiculous.

Anyway, I’m having the time of my life, and it’s just about my turn at the front, when another marching boy falls down in front of me, and starts having seizures. The paramedics race in.

Keep marching! Keep marching!

And I step around him in my boots.

Just one moment in my day, yeah

Take me up to a place

So far away in your

Heavenly space

We’re losing the truck that’s playing the music. Can’t hear a damn thing; just copying the boys in front of me.

Run, run! we’re told. Forced to make up gaps in the parade.

A marching boy to my left dislocates his shoulder and suddenly disappears.

It’s like we’re being mown down at Gallipoli.

One night, one night in heaven

When you touch me

Circle arms around, back the other way. Squat, squat. Camera flashes firing. A girl friend in the crowd screams my name. I rush out of line to steal a kiss, risking corporal discipline for breaking the formation. Perhaps hoping.

Oh the heat, the heat. Where are those water boys when you need them?

Then we turn the corner. Bright lights beaming down. So this is what the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation stand looks like. The crowd goes wild as we come into view.

There’s Marcia Hines with a microphone. Must buy one of her records.

The lights are bright, hot. But we turn in our best effort, emblazoned by a wattage to rival the adjacent Aussie Stadium.

You light up my life, make me feel so alive.

Oh yeah.

It’s Mardi Gras 2000 and I’m an old married man, having been in a relationship now for, oh, ten months.

My partner’s name is Steve, just like mine, and, actually, we’ve not heard any jokes about this fact. Not any good ones. So we made up our own, apropos the first film we saw together, Austin Powers’s The Spy Who Shagged Me; he calls me Mini Me and I call him Bigger Me.

We’ve decided to watch the parade from the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation stand this year. We’re rather excited; we’ll be seated in comfort, among our own and like-minded, and we’ll get to ogle Rugby League’s Ian Roberts wielding a microphone.

Actually, Big Steve wishes it was Matthew Lloyd up there, but apparently he’s not gay, and nor are any AFL players at all. That hugging they do is just camaraderie, apparently.

And then this guy sits next to us. We’ll call him Doofus.

Doofus is cute in his own self-regarded way. He is muscular – now, you don’t see much of that at Mardi Gras – and tall and he has dark hair and good cheekbones and he keeps taking his shirt off. He has 6 per cent body fat, or so he tells us. Again and again. He has also brought his wife along.

You guys are cool, you know? he says, slapping me on the back.

I’m comforted by this news. By his endorsement …

I don’t care what you guys do, doesn’t bother me at all.

Bit late if it did, sitting here, I think.

Doofus and his wife are plotting how he can get himself photographed with that drag queen three rows down. There is no shortage of boys around him who want to be in a photograph with Doofus with his shirt off. But what he wants, he says, is the drag queen.

I can’t help thinking, What do you really want, Doofus?

Doofus approaches the drag queen. She gives the obligatory drag queen smile for the camera. All teeth. Doofus looks happy.

I’m a bit sad. He’s back and talking to us again. I shall be berated later for my attitude by my better half, who likes to believe in people’s good intentions.

I’ve told my kid, don’t be homophobic, that’s what I’ve told her, says Doofus. He puts his arm around my shoulder and smiles. You guys are cool, you know?

Mine might be the love that dare not speak its name, but his is the love that won’t shut up.

We’re trying to hear celebrity lesbian couple Kerryn Phelps and Jackie Stricker hosting the parade as it comes through. Later, Jackie will refuse my request to interview the pair for this book because, she says, they’re writing their own. They will eventually call on the right-wing broadcaster Alan Jones to launch their book. For some reason, he’s not unkind to gays.

Kerryn’s brother Peter, the actor, is standing next to Kerryn in a cowboy hat. Not gay, apparently.

I’m really enjoying sitting here with you guys.

Doofus, we learn as we try to take in the parade, is a model, and has been photographed naked. Had we bought the (tacky, lurid) women’s magazine he’d appeared in?

No, not beyond a sneak look in the newsagents a few years ago, I tell him. He falls momentarily silent.

More parade, more wry Mardi Gras wit. It’s thin in the stands, though.

You know, says Doofus, his arm hovering over my shoulder again and landing with a thud, I’m really enjoying the Simon and Simon show.

Oh, thank goodness. He misheard our names.

Apparently, Doofus has a nude calendar out, but it’s only available overseas. Pity. He promises to send us copies if we’ll give him our address. But – no paper, no pen, we shrug.

Look, you guys make sure you find me at the party and give me your address, all right? He says this three times. He has no idea there are going to be 20,000 people at the Fox Studios party. We do not correct him.

I wonder, how many Doofuses are out there in the suburbs? They’re gay-friendly. Perhaps a little too gay-friendly to be merely what they appear. What is their underlying truth?

What is gay, anyway? A pair of wings in Oxford Street? A tab of ecstasy at the Hordern? A complete way of being, but an exclusive club whose door bitch demands total biological- essentialist certainty?

Maybe it’s time to stop theorising and start partying. It might be the most effective way of saying, We’re here. Get over it.

- 2001

2011 postscript: The Sydney Star Observer quoted my Gallipoli reference as being in poor taste. Is it dissembling now for me to say I was suggesting Mardi Gras likewise has iconic Australian status? But the good news is Big Steve and I have shared many Mardi Gras parties since; we moved to Sydney in 2002 and have been together almost 13 years.

I volunteered for Mardi Gras in 2005.

Parade working party meetings were held in a dingy Surry Hills fluorescent-lit room. About a dozen or more people sat around a table, occasionally chirping when their leader drew breath.

Under discussion was not what the messages to media should be. Some however suggested journalists must be contained in a cage at Taylor Square, and photographers redirected away from hairy bear bare bottoms and dyke tits on trikes.

As the sole journalist sent to help out by Mardi Gras Central, I could see I was in for some fun and they were dying to draw on my wealth of media experience …

once they opened the door, which must have been very thick thus my knocks went unheard ...

and once they slowly emerged from under the table …

Poignantly keen to contribute something, I offered to pioneer the first complete parade guide. Ignoring the handbags that were being drawn to protect the names and party pant sizes of Mardi Gras parade participants, who so seek privacy they dance up one of Sydney’s main thoroughfares, I set about contacting all 80 entries and writing them all up for the gay press liftout.

The parade committee was then being run by a fellow who followed me up the street during the preliminary parade site visit, telling me none of the entrants would want to be identified in a parade guide. He would have barely been born in 1978, when the Herald named all the participants arrested at the first Mardi Gras, but he sure identified with that era.

Despite the stonewalling on the parade databank, I eventually got the email addresses of the entrants, and found that in 2005, with the privacy-free Facebook and Twitter still a couple of years away, almost every entrant in the parade responded warmly to my emails and wanted their float details and, in some cases, names in the guide in all their fabulousness.

Except …

A vocal sado-masochistic couple from Brisbane who, having received my email, phoned the Mardi Gras office and left a phone message, which the office asked me to return.

When I did, one of the S&M lads yelled down the phone that they didn’t want inclusion in the bloody guide. How very dare I, etc.

I couldn’t quite work out amid their ranting if they’d withdrawn from the parade or had privacy concerns.

Either way, that was fine, but the phone call was an education: who knew capricious rudeness to Mardi Gras volunteers was part of the leather scene?

I don’t know, I’m guessing here, but perhaps it was the master of the duo who, in his butchest voice, subsequently complained about my telephone intrusion – what most of us would refer to as returning a call – to someone at Mardi Gras head office. I can’t imagine what my misdeeds were said to be; it wasn’t as though I had made off with one of their paddles.

Nonetheless, one of the Mardi Gras heavyweights immediately emailed me, telling me I wouldn’t be welcome in Mardi Gras again. Later, informed these S&M boys had been difficult to manage before, the honcho retracted the contents of his hasty email.

I could stay. I was honoured ...

On Mardi Gras night 2005, the heavyweight gave me a quick kiss, which may have been approaching an apology.

Oh, and both those Mardi Gras organisers are now my friends on Facebook. Where nothing’s private.

Along with 65 drag queens. With sharp, photogenic teeth.

I lost touch with Doofus. Has anyone checked Grindr or Scruff?

Chapter One

KEITHO AND DAVO

Keith Hibbins is a tall, rakish boy. Light brown hair, parted and slicked to one side. Freckles, teethy smile. Each lunchtime, he cycles from school back to the house for the main family meal of the day, past the weatherboard homes, through the familiar streets of Maryborough, in western Victoria. He seeks advice from his big sister, Lorna, and little sister, June, on what their mother Merle is cooking, because they’ve eaten earlier. He has a Jack Russell, which barks and jumps to life at home on his approach. The dog’s name? Sheila, of course.

Bill Hibbins is a builder, a child of an orphanage. But he and Merle are determined to give their three children, born in the 1950s, stability and love. So it is no surprise that the boy, Keitho, as he is known, is affectionate, demonstrative. Bright, too. And outgoing. For his ninth birthday he initiates a party and invites his school friends. Then he gets around to telling his mother, who is forced into frantic last minute shopping to cater.

Keitho has the hots for a couple of the guys at high school. He thinks one of them might be gay; the one who cracks the shits when Keitho goes driving with the other. Officially, though, Keitho has girlfriends before he has boyfriends.

If you were tracking fault lines in a common Australian point of view, Maryborough might be one road stop. The town was built on the gold rush. In the 1850s, thousands of diggers, many Chinese and European immigrants, poured into the nearby White Hills. At around the same time, some 75 kilometres south, at Ballarat, some of the same fortune seekers were slaughtered in their droves in the Eureka stockade – some say it was a massacre – and the modern union movement dawned.

By the 1960s Maryborough is, predictably enough, still a stultifying place if you are a little bit different. And Keith Hibbins is certainly that. The town is particularly proud of the native wattles and of gumleaf playing.

Keitho runs his own boisterous race. He matriculates and the country kid comes to the city in the early 70s to study architecture at Melbourne University. Perhaps the campus life speeds up the long coming out process that gay men of his era usually face. He starts dating the daughter of one of his architectural employers, but it just doesn’t work out right.

He has to tell her that he really prefers men. She turns around and tells him that actually, she prefers women.

None of this fazes Keitho. He’s a big party boy. That’s something that’s innate in him, it will be commented upon later by the person who knew him best. His propensity to party should not be considered Keitho’s chosen lifestyle option.

Keitho is a natural-born party animal, all six-foot-one of him. Doesn’t mind a drink.

Look at that, says David Campbell, handing me a black and white photograph of a boy aged about 10. Freckly, hair diligently combed and parted to the side, big cheesy grin. Keitho.

"Isn’t that an incredible photograph? Oh, I’ve got photographs of Keitho where he is a real dork! But that photograph, I used to see up his mum’s place when we went up, and it always took my … he pauses and stumbles over the word, … h-heart away."

David Campbell dissolves, and I reach across the table to touch his hand, while I turn the tape recorder off.

We’re sitting in the kitchen of their Edwardian house, the one Keitho redesigned, in Melbourne’s northern inner-city Collingwood. Sleek, 1990s tones, polished timber floors. And Keitho’s coffee machine. David Campbell is learning to master an espresso on his own.

A silver Alessi fruit bowl. Davo would caution Keitho about his penchant for brand names. You don’t own it, he would say. You’re only a custodian.

We resume taping.

"When I went up to his mum’s place, I just loved that photograph. It’s just so happy, and he’s just so vibrant.

"Later on he was a real lookin’ dork, I mean you wouldn’t bother with it. But I knew that even if I met him then, I would have loved him."

This assessment includes the picture of Keitho with long wavy hair and 70s brown and beige woolen vest.

What was it about him?

"About Keitho?" says David Campbell, wiping his cheeks, his eyes rounding on me as thought it is an odd question. He looks tired, lined, drawn, and his bald 48-year-old head accentuates that effect.

"I don’t know. A connection. You know, because you love your partner. It’s that connection. I remember meeting him, when I met him the first time. I thought he was somebody else …"

One beer, that’s all David Campbell wants, all he is determined to have. Tonight he is going to behave himself in all senses of the word. He puts enough money in his pocket for one beer and flings his wallet into the glovebox of his ute, and heads into the pub. He’d knocked off work as a self-employed gardener at about 4.30. It is now 6pm. The early November sun is yet to fall over Commercial Road in Melbourne’s inner-south-east; too early for the true bustle to begin along the burgeoning gay mini-mecca.

In the early 80s, long before morphing into a handbaggy nightclub, the Market Hotel is a pub with a friendly rather than faceless façade. David Campbell is 30, knows the gay scene. But has never been in love before. That is about to change.

And then he sees him. That’s his friend Robert, isn’t it? Keith Hibbins, at the bar, waves back. David approaches him and he realises the mistaken identity.

Keitho – for that is what David will come to call him, and in turn be called Davo – is tall and slender, 28, and bearded, with hair already receding. He admits he hadn’t seen who was waving to him; he needs his glasses.

But they talk. And talk. And talk. David thinks, This guy’s great.

They have dinner with Keitho’s friends. And then go to a gay nightclub in beachside St Kilda, Mandate. The pair head back to Keitho’s to stay the night.

For some years, they live in Acland Street, St Kilda. Davo finds it hard to keep up with Keitho’s love of the nightlife. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Monday, even. Davo used to be a big reader, but virtually gives up the habit for a few years after meeting Keitho. He’d happily stay at home and be a hermit, but what he wants more than anything is to be by Keitho’s side.

Keitho always buys Davo a book as a gift. Davo is not a present person, but Keitho loves to mark an occasion.

The sex continues to be filled with passion. Sometimes you can hear Keitho’s orgasms down the other end of Acland Street. He clamps his hand over his lover’s mouth, and they giggle.

Old Mrs Carmel is among their favourite neighbours. All these men living in the flats and you’re all bachelors, she says with amazement.

A few queer facts of life are explained to Mrs Carmel.

Still, she loves the boys. One day, she decides to bake Keitho and Davo a plate of sweet pastries to show her affection.

She enters the back door of the apartment, unperturbed by the noise from the lounge room.

There are the two men busy confirming their bachelor status.

Mrs Carmel stands there, face frozen, plate of pastries in hand. I just made you some piroskies.

Then there is the drink, of course. If Keitho is bored, or an architectural project has been completed, he will imbibe.

Davo will often pick up Keitho after work when Keitho has had a long lunch. Keitho will stagger towards his partner, whose arms will be folded.

G’day matey, he’ll slur. I love ya.

Keitho will end up sleeping it off. Davo will sit around, thinking, Well, what am I going to do? But he will never consider going out without him.

Davo grew up