SynopsisPlot
From the land of Down Under comes this true story about a male high school drama student who falls in love with the football team captain. Winner of the United Nations Human Rights Award for Nonfiction, HOLDING THE MAN has been adapted into a play opening in America in September 2007. The playwright who adapted the book for stage refers to this as a memoir of striking and unapologetic honesty.
Story
About this book
Holding the Man is a memoir by Australian writer Tim Conigrave. It begins in a Melbourne high school, where Conigrave, a drama student, falls in love with John Caleo, the captain of the football team. Their relationship starts in adolescence and continues into adulthood, spanning roughly fifteen years. The book traces how two young men in 1970s and 1980s Australia navigated a relationship that defied the social expectations around them.
Conigrave wrote with directness about love, sex, loyalty, and the pressures that shaped their lives together. The memoir records ordinary domestic detail alongside larger questions about identity and belonging in a society that was still hostile toward same-sex relationships during much of the period described. He completed the manuscript shortly before his death in 1994.
The book received the United Nations Human Rights Award for Nonfiction and was later adapted for the stage, with the theatrical version opening in the United States in 2007. The adaptation was described by its playwright as drawing on a memoir of striking and unapologetic honesty. Holding the Man has remained one of the most widely read Australian memoirs of its era.
