We meet in Christos’ back-alley office in Thornbury. Our orbits crossover every few years.
We first met in the early 1990s both sons of post-war Greek migrants who shared similar politics, liked the same music, literature, art, and films. We weren’t the ‘Greek good boys’, we were transgressive.
From Tsiolkas’ first novel Loaded he has created a corpus, a testimony to transgressive ‘wogs.’ A Dionysian punch-in-the-gut energy has pulsed though all his books.
We are middle-aged ‘wogs’ living in the gentrified, pink-haired, inked, bespoke burger and small batch brew suburbs of Melbourne’s north. Suburbs once consigned to working class, poor, migrants – our parents.
Tsiolkas in his latest book also deals with the limitations of an ageing body. The way an ageing body traps youth, and fences it from youthful Eros.
“We are of similar age, the same generation, and in 7 ½ I reflect on what happens when the body seizes to do what you want the body to do.”
“I’m not an old man” he says, “but I am getting used to moving into that final section of my life.”
Autobiographical polemic
“I was working on a novel called Resentment about politics, or ideas, based on someone creating a fake hate crime.”
The book “felt dead on the page.” He was in England in March 2020 just before COVID-19 became a global crisis
“I was there for publicity for Damascus and was planning a trip to Glasgow with Wayne to celebrate our 35th anniversary,” he says.
“I was kissing and hugging with friends, getting drunk and smoking, and then within a week the whole world changed, and we had to get out.”
They caught a flight back March 17 and started two weeks of home quarantine.
“While locked in I started 7 ½ and it flowed, I had the idea, I had the title, and I knew that I wanted it to be like Fellini’s 8 ½, but this time about a writer trying to work out his new book…I realised it was the next book and it fucking flew.”
In 7 ½ Tsiolkas the character, th writer, wants to write about a retired American gay porn star, Paul, who lives in coastal NSW with his wife and son.
Paul the 1980s gay porn star is invited by an older man to Los Angeles, for much money for private performance, as the character of from his old porn films.
The story within the story is That Sweet Thing, a film, was going to be another book.
“I once wanted to be a filmmaker, so it was a realisation that I was not going to be a filmmaker and became a writer.”
I confess my own realisation that I was never to become a novelist, even after wading through the unfinished novels for 30 years only to realise that I was a journalist.
“What happened? When did the realisation come?” he asks.
“You happened! Every time I began, you’d publish a new book and say what I wanted to say.”
We laugh and have another cigarette. We are middle aged men hiding, like teenagers having a smoke at high school, only now away from the gaze of our middle class peers and partners.
The polemic in 7 ½ wrestles with questions that have been circulating in his mind for some time.
“Like, do I have a right to write as a CIS white male?”
“I am not a journalist and a non-fiction writer, but what I do in 7 ½ is highlight the paucity in understanding history.
“Not only that the history you know, but the history of the left and this is probably a thing we have been doing in discussions you and I have had over the last 15-years – and if you and I can call ourselves left, it means having to understand the huge calamities of what happened in the Soviet Union, in Cambodia, and in China.”
We can now see the calamities created by the left we believed in as young socialists, as it unfolds in media, including social media.
Tsiolkas seems fed-up with the bemoaning one’s identity at the expense of reality, or class.
“I was with a group of men about a year ago, all gay, and they were going how much you know the problem of the world is the ‘white male, I can’t stand the white male.’
“I just couldn’t help it and said, ‘you have sex with a white male’
“It doesn’t make sense to me, it concerns me, the question being, ‘what is happening within your own psyche?”
From people of colour to white
When did we become white? When did we pass?
“I question that throughout 7 ½” Tsiolkas says.
“I go back to my parents, to family, to the migrants, the Mediterranean and Levantine bodies, our colour, our smells, and our culture.”
His last book, Damascus was about St Paul’s belief and doubt. It was an apotheosis.
“When writing Damascus, I looked at doubt, and doubt is the greatest thing that I’ve taken from that engagement for the last eight years.”
He reminds me of my minor influence on Damascus. “it came out of those conversations you and I had, drunk, stoned and on speed in Adelaide in 2005.”
7 ½ punches against “the new Calvinists”.
“The so-called left, teh progressives, have become religious, teleological…you see the fundamentalist Calvinist values, that the only thing that matters is the world to come.”
“This world is insane, this world is corrupt, we are looking for a heaven,” Tsiolkas is annimated and we light another smoke.
He writes in 7 ½: ‘I read many books nominated for globalised book prizes; so many of them priggish and scolding, or contrite and chastened.’
“Look at the work around” Tsiolkas adds, “most of the books, films and art now are all dire, they are terrible. We live in fear – there’s an element of the emperor’s new clothes with this language and the situation.”
“James Button wrote a series of essays for The Age on cancel culture, and what struck me was that many were happy to be quoted if their names weren’t mentioned.”
Tsiolkas was happy to read Harper’s Magazine letter from 2020, the response where whole series of people were saying “enough there’s something dangerous that’s happening within these institutions”
“It’s puritanical a classic case of “she’s a witch, burn her, burn her” but it’s also an absolute fear and terror of accepting that there is complexity.”
In 7 ½ Tsiolkas searches for beauty – in the bodies of youth, beauty of soaring pelicans, or a beach measured by the beats of its waves.
“I love this world” he says.
Liberation – today’s anathema
Beauty in 7 ½ weaves itself from the beach, screeching parrots, gliding pelicans, and memories of beautiful guiltless bodies. Beauty overrides the new puritans.
“Liberation now is an anathema to the progressives, to the left, but it feels like a very Anglo view.”
“An American woman in Paris, years ago, a woman in her 60s was doing French classes, and she was making a point in discussions with American students who were protesting the ‘misrepresentation of a female body’ in the Louvre, and she said, you’re wrong, it is beautiful you’re all ‘Calvinists’.
The world of art and writing is “antiseptic now,” and that he is “sickened by the smugness of the puritans.”
He heralds the beauty of heterosexual masculinity in the book:
‘The reality of homosexuality, regardless of all the rhetoric of liberation and the assertion of equality can never undo, is that when confronted with the magnificence of heterosexual masculinity and beauty the homosexual must submit even rage against the desire perverting it mocking it and wanting it’
Tsiolkas says it was important “to claim as equal, as integral to relationship, something called beautiful.”
“There is absolute terror and fear in accepting that there is contradiction, that there is complexity – our psyches are designed to deal with complexity.”
Tsiolkas purposely starts 7 ½ with Jean Genet: ‘a gay man, an author, who understands that and makes it a focus of his art from the beginning from the very beginning a man who started writing in gaol.’
He charts a course many of the new puritanical left would deem taboo. The stirrings of sexuality he, (the character), felt as a boy at the sight of Stavros, a friend of his parents staying with them.
“The scene where the character is sexually excited by the smell and view of the adult Stavros, is about how I felt, I was this high and it was my first airings of desire.”
The world of art and writing is “antiseptic now,” and that he is “sickened by the smugness of the puritans.”
I point to the new ‘sensitivity readings’ that much new work must undergo in the Anglosphere.
“The puritans are radical, they are anti-human, and misanthropy guides them – I do not trust absolutism.”
“I have been arguing against radical feminism all my life, I do not believe in separatists, now they are the enemy because they argue for biological sex, it’s insanity.
The real minority of literature, arts, journalism, and academia
I was out for a drink with buddies post lockdown, when I saw women and men that were aesthetically stunning and sexually charged. Muscular bodies, abundant cleavages, alien to the world of the puritans in academia and the arts.
“These are real people, they don’t care” he says.
“We struggle in our world, but there are other worlds not tainted by the Calvinists in academia, arts, and literature.
“You and I know that world because of our ethnicity and our class, we have a foot in both worlds, we can negotiate with tradies, with business, with ethnics, I don’t think any of the new puritans can do that. The missing link is class,” Tsiolkas says.
“But I worry about my rage, if you give in to rage, then opponents lose humanity.”
He calls out the “the Emperor’s New Clothes” of identity politics and says, “it’s all fake, without class.”
“It’s all about fear, writers are scared, they do not challenge themselves, the actors are scared, even if they may be the right colour, they are scared that if they utter a line that is controversial, they will be slammed, or cancelled, so you get really bad art.”
We could have been plumbers, or developers, like many of our Greek Australian peers. Driving $200,000 cars, pumped with Botox, and with ultra-white teeth.
We could just not care about puritans destroying art like the Christian iconoclasts did once.
“I doubt that you and I can do that mate” he laughs.