While day-drinking ouzo in a spiderwebbed taverna on the Greek island of Paros, I decided to write a coming-out letter to my parents. I sealed it in a surface mail envelope, moistened a ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΔΗΜΟΚΡΑΤΙΑ (Hellenic Republic) stamp with my aniseed tongue and posted it.
It was the 1990s and I had only just relocated from Australia to London with Nick, my boyfriend at the time, and Julie, a good mate. We had gone across to Greece for a holiday, island-hopping, catching ferries on a whim, knowing nothing about the places we were visiting except that backpacking there was cheap.
At ferry stops, homestay hagglers hustled us into their cars. They drove us to remote domatia, where we slept on crisp white bedsheets that had been washed then draped to dry over fragrant hedges of rosemary. We ambled down dirt tracks and spoke to goats. Broke into village chapels with the entitlement of curious Australians abroad.
I turned 30 there and, in an outpouring of camp, I sang Judy Garland’s I Don’t Care, dancing on a weed-girt chunk of granite, part of a fallen ruin. But I was lying, I did care because back home in Australia I had always adopted the shape of my parents’ ideal: their hetero son. After drinking a half bottle of ouzo, I resolved to kill him off.
As my coming-out letter steamed across the Aegean on a ferry to Athens, regret sailed into my sleep. I had nightmares of parricide.
The island was beautiful but a cancerous reservation undermined my enjoyment of it. I started to notice how the esplanades were splattered with ink from caught octopus, slapped and tenderised to death on the concrete. How the shallows were booby trapped with spiky sea urchins. How used condoms were more plentiful than jellyfish.
Departing Paros for the queer mecca of Mykonos, I hoped I could be guiltlessly gay. Half-naked on beaches full of men. But at a bar festooned with fishing nets and neon floats, I found myself cornered by a group of old Greek women. They wanted to dance. Not to Kylie or Madonna but to the hetero anthems of Springsteen.
I was coerced to do the sort of moves that children do with their parents at weddings, holding hands and pulling back and forth, like robots sawing wood. I fantasised that the yiayias were commissioned by my parents to conjure the son that I didn’t want to be any more. The good boy. The liar.
After Mikonos, we sailed to Naxos, Ios, Santorini. On Folegandros, we stayed in a villa on a beach, down a path presided over by a sarcastic-eyed donkey. We drank cheap retsina and barbecued sardines at night.
Unable to sleep, I turned to night writing: the beginnings of a novel about two closeted boys from an oppressive Salt Lake City chapter of the Mormon church on a foreign posting to Australia, where they fall in love. It was a flawed, didactic projection of what I’d hoped to achieve by escaping to the northern hemisphere.
Three weeks after I sent my letter, I found a payphone in Folegandros to make a call to my sister.
“Are mum and dad alright?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Did they get a letter from me?”
“Not that I know of.”
Spooked, I contacted a flatmate in London who was checking my mail. A letter had arrived for me. Not from my parents, it was a job offer from an ad agency in Brisbane, an offer too good to refuse. Or that’s what I told Nick and Julie.
Really, I wanted to fly home, to intercept my Trojan letter, before my parents brought it in from their post box and opened the damned thing at their kitchen table.
I arrived home too late.
My mother, who opened the letter alone, had already concreted over her feelings. My words, though alcoholically composed, were beyond her limit. She didn’t want to speak about me being gay. She didn’t want me to tell my father either.
Now, when I look back at Paros, I’m reminded not of the colour of the Aegean, or the fragrant bedsheets or the goats. I’m reminded of the letter I sent from there, to my parents. What writing a letter like that had meant. It was a symbol of the distance between them and me. A symbol of my naivety too. That I could write them a letter about coming out and think it would be enough.
Steve MinOn is the author of First Name Second Name, available now through UQP (A$32.99).
