State
of
Domestic
Bliss
more in common than Barbra
Streisand and Architectural Digest created a lasting relationship
As I was to discover, my life with Kevin was to prove anything but average and everyone of our experiences, whether going on holiday or looking for a new lamp, provided endless opportunities to write up into funny and off-beat stories.
Being a freelance journalist made it an easy exercise for me to write my own version of what its like to be part of a successful gay relationship. And I set out to avoid either making us sound perfect or mind numbingly dull. I started from the beginning: that perfect moment when I met my Mr Right. Ironically, my first reaction was, �not another pest!� But I ended up spending the night on Oxford Street with him talking, right through to having breakfast at a local diner then walking hand in hand up the street to Centennial Park in Sydney.
As we got to know each other over the next few months we discovered that we had a few things in common, Barbra Streisand and Architectural Digest among them. But the more we got to know each other the more we realised that we were both quite different. There were the obvious physical differences: he was 26, I was 32. He was blond, blue eyed and five foot ten. I was six foot four, dark-haired and skinny. I used to joke that he should carry a stepladder with him so that he could reach me.
Height wasn�t the only difference though. We both came from very different worlds. He was outgoing and a highly social person. I was bookish and introspective. He was a practical man with a nursing background and a man that had learn�t how to survive from the school of hard knocks. I had an interest in the sciences and literature and my thoughts were abstract and philosophical. His were dollars and cents. I went to bed with a book; he went to bed with a calculator. I had to wonder if there was enough to keep us together.
Fortunately, we were able to find more things in common, than apart. And neither of us wanted to return to the revolving door of the gay singles scene - we were both keen to build something that would last. The first few months of our relationship also kept us busy by the need to do the practical things that a gay couple do together. This included shopping, finding a home to share, and going on holidays.
But if I had thought that I was going to settle down to a quiet life of domestic bliss I was wrong. It seemed that we couldn�t do any of the ordinary things that two gay men do without finding ourselves in some off beat and sometimes downright hilarious situations. And the people I met along the way were just as off beat and hilarious. From moving new couches up endless flights of stairs to painting the kitchen�s of celebrities our lives were an endless series of comic misadventures.
And the people we collided with on the way where just as off-beat. Kevin�s brother, Tony, was a constant riot with his stories of trannies and truck maintance. There were friends like the Doctor, a gay couple counsellor who can�t find love; Dominic, the white witch of Kings Cross; and Zowie and Teagan who owned a dog named after a woman�s codpiece (called a Merkin). With friends like these anything and everything did happen.
And our comic misadventures didn�t end as our relationship �cemented� over the years. Kevin went from being a nurse to a manager of a hotel to managing his own serviced apartment business in Sydney. I went from one fairly boring public service job to the other (gay freelance journalism doesn�t pay!). We moved from outer Sydney to inner (Kings Cross). But our lives never settled down into anything you would call routine or regular.
It�s been ten years now since that first glance was caught and held. That single glance that was to change my life forever.
