In February 1997, at midnight, I was riding my pushbike through a park on my way to Canberra’s city centre when I somehow became sprawled on the ground, my palms bloodied and covered in gravel. Earlier I had been drinking with friends; now, so it seemed, a fence had come out of nowhere.
Every week that summer I had been going to Heaven, Canberra’s only gay nightclub. I had told no one about my nocturnal adventures. Nor had I met anyone. I had grown up listening to the Cure, not Madonna. Rather than go shopping, I could talk for hours about the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín. Sitting around a campfire was my thing, not pumping weights.
