ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Prudish Nation is a book that probably wouldn’t have been on my radar (because I assumed it would be about censorship, and I’ve already read Nicole Moore’s 2012 The Censor’s Library) but last week I heard Dalgarno in conversation with Angela Meyer about her new book Moon Sugar (2022, see my review), and I realised that Prudish Nation is about something else entirely!

It’s dedicated to anyone who’s ever felt like a weirdo, and anyone who hasn’t.  It’s a kind of guidebook to understanding cultural shifts in the way we approach gender and sexuality.

This is the blurb:

Interviewing more than 30 Australia-based authors and thinkers while examining his own journey towards being openly non-monogamous, Poly author Paul Dalgarno pulls together social history and illuminating first-hand accounts of what it means to have ‘unconventional’ relationships – with others and even with ourselves – in 21st-century Australia.

Do authors such as Christos Tsiolkas, Dennis Altman and Andrea Goldsmith think we’re more tolerant than we once were? Are writers such as Lee Kofman, Rochelle Siemienowicz and Jinghua Qian optimistic about the future? Do terms such as LGBTQIA+ help or hinder meaningful progress? How does transitioning now compare to transitioning in the 1990s? How does ‘queerness’ affect notions of parenthood? Do therapists and psychologists still operate from a straight-white-male perspective and how can new practitioners such as popular psychologist and author Chris Cheers change that?

Entertaining, insightful, funny and thought-provoking, Prudish Nation adjusts the country’s bedside lamp to show us a little more clearly who and what we really are.

Prudish Nation is a really interesting book which is rich in information.  It taught me about many things that I’d never really thought about, but I’m going to confine myself to just one aspect of one chapter to illustrate why it’s a book that most of us should read.

Now, because over the course of my life I can count among my friends and family people who identify with all the letters in the acronym LGBTQIA (and maybe also the +sign which is a recognition that there are categories of non heterosexual and non-cisgender people still absent) I might have a tendency to think that everyone else is as okay with this as they should be.  But I still had things to learn from Chapter 6, ‘What even are you?’ which explores ‘labelling’.

For a start, it clarified the acronym as we know it. According to Dennis Altman…

…it pulls together things that are actually quite different.  L, G & B are all descriptions of sexual preference or sexual desire.  T is, of course, for trans, which is an expression of gender, and may or may not be related to sexual desire.  The I — intersex — is a biological reality based on a person’s physical characteristics. (p.82)

The first three letters — recognising solidarity but also difference — became common in the 1980s, and T for transgender was added in the 1990s, and more recently queer, intersex and asexual (or “allied” depending on who you ask) have been included too, along with the +.  But now, to extend the nuance of the plus-sign, another term — LGBTQQIP2SAA — is emerging.

It signifies lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, two spirit, asexual and ally.

‘I prefer the term “queer” as an overall category,’ Dennis says.  ‘I’d rather that than watching the poor newsreaders on SBS struggling every time they have to say “the LGBTQIA+ community”.  For that reason, if nothing else, I think “queer” is a very useful word.” (p.83)

(Well, #RespectfullyDisagreeing: I don’t see any newsreaders struggling.  I think the acronym kind-of rolls off the tongue now, though adapting to LGBTQQIP2SAA might take a while!)

Andrea Goldsmith likes “queer” too.  She thinks that the ‘alphabet stew’ is well-meaning, but…

‘People are trying to be inclusive, but in doing so they’re actually emulsifying our differences, and that’s not diversity. The heterosexuals are in one group all by themselves, and all the non-hets are smooshed together. Seems to rather privilege the heterosexuals….” (p.84)

But there’s no such thing as a spokesperson for even one letter, or any other identity. 

Holden Sheppard, OTOH, doesn’t like being labelled, and he doesn’t like “queer” because of its connotations of “strange” and it doesn’t feel strange to him to be attracted to men.  He also points out that he’s not LGBTQIA+, he’s just one letter.

And while he’s pleased that his books get some traction at literary festivals, he makes a point that festival programmers should note:

“You end up on panel after panel that’s the “LGBT+ diversity panel”, Holden Sheppard says.  ‘You know: We’ve got three people here who are one of those letters. And it’s fine.  I like that we’re doing that. I like that my books have contributed to that conversation because it’s an important conversation to be having.  But sometimes you get there and you’re thinking, “Just put me on a panel as an author who wrote a book that used language nicely or made you feel something…”. The diversity thing seems to obscure every other element of who you are. ‘(p.86)

Something else to note:

Using labels to describe yourself and having others use them to describe you are , of course, very different things, whether or not the labels you’re employing are the same. (p.92)

Other chapters cover ‘coming out’; role models; different types of marriage; gay parenthood and much more.

Author: Paul Dalgarno
Title: Prudish Nation, Life, love and libido
Publisher: Upswell Publishing, 2023
Cover design by Chil3, Fremantle
ISBN: 9780645536928, pbk., 212 pages including notes
Review copy courtesy of Upswell Publishing.