I AM SIX years old, and I am in my Aunty Shirley’s caravan. Her kettle, full of loose-leaf billy tea, whistles in the kitchen where she and my mother exchange local gossip. I am alone in the bedroom, where I clumsily strip to my underpants before slipping into my aunt’s cream-coloured satin nightgown. I breathe in its perfume of powder and lavender and canter through the caravan’s back door. I leap across the barren paddock, relishing the satin’s cool caress. I kick up red dust; it is carried away on the wind. 

I AM EIGHT years old, and I am in the schoolyard. A group of children sit and stare from a distance. They point and laugh, whisper and watch while I eat my strawberry jam sandwich. After a while, one boy approaches, jeers, and asks, ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ My expression is blank, but my hands begin to tremble. 

He walks away – is replaced by one of his friends, then another, then another. ‘Are you a boy or a girl? Are you a boy or a girl?’  

AS CHILDREN, WE look to the world around us, to those who came before us, to understand where we belong. Over time, we internalise the norms and ideologies of the society in which we live. We call this process socialisation. But what happens when we do not identify entirely with that which is modelled to us? What happens when there are parts of ourselves that, to our knowledge, should not or do not exist? How do we make sense of who we are?  

I was born and raised in a rural farming town. A town where ‘pigging’ (that is, hunting and killing wild pigs) is a highly favoured pastime; a town where the ability to hold one’s drink is a revered form of social capital; a town where heteropatriarchal norms reign supreme. Suffice to say, it was a town entirely devoid of positive queer representation – but this was a problem afflicting the culture at large, too. During this time, before smartphones and social media, young queer people in search of their tribe were limited to two options. First, they looked to the world around them, where rural masculinities demanded the masking and suppression of their non-normative inclinations. Second, they looked to the world depicted in contemporary mainstream media, where queer people were bastardised as the butt of misogynistic jokes or demonised as predators. Coming of age in this environment, I could not identify a way of living that I could grow into. I felt that – at any moment – I would simply fall off the edge of the Earth. 

When I graduated from high school, I was finally free to leave – to venture beyond the borders and confinements of my small town to search for something I inherently knew was missing from my life. And so, at seventeen years of age, I sped down the well-worn Carnarvon Highway towards an uncertain future. A part of me wished that I didn’t need to leave my town and my family, but I knew it was my only chance at survival. 

AT UNIVERSITY, I studied the history of sexuality. It was here that I began to understand how, throughout the history of the colonised West, the normative or ‘intelligible’ body has long been that of the cisgendered, heterosexual, masculine, able-bodied, white male. This intersection of identities has long been the framework through which the rest of society is understood. Individuals outside these parameters are socially constructed as deviant, dangerous or entirely ‘unintelligible’ – sequestered to the margins of society, where they are silenced, if not entirely struck from the history books. Historians of sexuality grapple with the arduous task of recovering these silenced individuals – these ‘unintelligible’ bodies – from the gaps and shadows of history. In my effort to make myself ‘intelligible’, I too, like a historian, scoured the murky depths. That is where I found him. 

NELSON SULLIVAN WAS a hairdresser turned cab driver turned music consultant turned filmmaker. Between 1981 and 1989, behind a big red door on Manhattan’s Ninth Avenue, Nelson devoted his life to immortalising the characters of the area’s vibrant art and nightlife scenes.  

This was all unfolding during a dissonant period in the city’s history. The resounding impact of the Stonewall riots, which took place just over a decade before, had nurtured downtown’s vibrancy. Concurrently, the emergence of something The New York Times would coin a ‘gay cancer’ in 1981 would soon threaten the immense progress these trailblazers had made. In the shadow of HIV/AIDS, Manhattan’s queer galleries and clubs became sacred spaces in which to perform radical acts of resistance against both the disease that threatened queer people and their way of life, and the widespread moral panic that the virus incited. 

From behind the lens of his 8 mm camcorder, Nelson captured countless hours of daily life during this time for himself and his motley crew. RuPaul, Lady Bunny, Michael Musto, Keith Haring and Susanne Bartsch were but a handful of the rising stars in his constellation – artists, performers and creators who, in spite of the threat of HIV/AIDS, defiantly shaped the landscape of queer and mainstream culture. 

In 2008, Dick Richards – one of Nelson’s oldest and closest friends – digitised countless hours of footage from the tapes before uploading them to the YouTube account 5NinthAvenueProject. It’s the most extensive archive of this crucial moment in queer history, a time before the instant gratification of smartphones and an oversaturated social mediascape. To date, there is no other archive in existence that captures so candidly and extensively what life was like in downtown Manhattan during that time. 

For six months, I watched Nelson’s footage every night before bed, staring into the young and beautiful faces of a generation set to be ravaged by HIV/AIDS. In the footage, they’re frozen in time: they dine around tables laid with tealight candles and mismatched flatware; they drink wine from coffee mugs and design outfits to parade around the Pyramid and Tunnel. I tried to forget the distance and decades that separated us because, for the first time, I’d found somewhere I could belong. 

IN ONE OF my favourite videos, an overhead lamp’s amber glow gleams off Nelson’s bare abdomen. Wearing nothing but tight black briefs, he stands by his antique Steinway upright, intently arranging sheet music. After a while, he begins to play passionately. The classical score fills the room. Whenever I watch this video, I am overcome with emotion and a sense of deep kinship with this man I never met. What I feel for him transcends the scope of friend or lover, of father or brother or son. It is a feeling entirely undefinable. 

It was a grey Wednesday when I watched what would be Nelson’s final tape, filmed in July 1989. In the video, Nelson and his friend Bill Moye are walking Nelson’s dog, Blackout. When they reach the westernmost point of Manhattan, Bill and Blackout race each other to the water’s edge. Nelson trails behind. 

‘They’re running all the way out there to the end of the pier,’ he begins in his charming Southern drawl. ‘But I don’t feel like running today.’ He sighs. ‘It’s July the third, and it’s the last day I’m gonna have…not to be running.’ 

Later that evening, at forty-one years of age, Nelson Sullivan dies of a heart attack. 

In many of his tapes, Nelson acknowledges that people berated him and failed to understand what he was doing and why. 

‘People think I’m crazy,’ he admits. ‘But when they see the tapes, they’ll realise what I’m doing.’ 

WHEN I USED to think of Nelson, I experienced a deep sense of grief. I mourned the untimely loss of this amazing man without whom I may not have found my way into the present. Now, I’m just grateful for the lessons I learnt from this defiant queer creator who – in spite of what people thought and said – carved out a place for himself in the world. Through space and time, Nelson showed me what I was capable of: illuminated countless possibilities, timelines, and lives spanning outwards in every direction. Most importantly, he helped me heal the boy I once was – that small-town boy in the silky, satin nightgown. 

Nelson Sullivan taught me the importance of perseverance. He taught me that I am a queer ancestor waiting to be born and that it’s important for me to share my story – to leave something behind that future generations can see themselves in. I have learnt that, even if they are no longer on this Earth, our queer ancestors – having laid the path we walk upon – endure in the present and guide us towards the future. Whenever I think about this, I think about Nelson up ahead of me, guiding me into the wild, bright morning.