Review: Host City by David Owen Kelly

Australia’s response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic which emerged in the West in the 1980s, mainly among men who have sex with men, has been described as world-leading. Built from the ground up, communities, science and governments worked together in a way that prevented an unmitigated catastrophe. Today, there are plans afoot to eliminate HIV transmission in Australia.

But catastrophe it was: nearly 6,500 people have died in the pandemic in Australia, and 40 million worldwide. The experience of HIV/AIDS has been compared by gay men in Australia as “our World War I” (and perhaps it was putting society on a war footing that lay behind the success of the response). Stigma ran rampant, stirred up by the notorious 1987 Grim Reaper ad and fanned by figures the likes of the notorious Reverend Fred Nile of the Christian Democrats, still doing his bit in the 2010s to prevent further rights for queer people. Australian states had only recently started decriminalising sex between men. Before it was renamed AIDS, the disease was known as GRID: gay-related immune deficiency.

This idea of history — contingent, experienced very differently depending on one’s position in society — lies deep in the foundations of Host City. David Owen Kelly takes us back to the war zone, and then some, to evoke “the worst years of the disease”: “stigma combined with a terrible exhaustion”. We meet an older Kelly, who goes by his camp name Kit, working at the fictional Gold Bar in Darlinghurst. The death of a property mogul’s son has cracked open his memories, and he takes us back to his childhood in Brisbane in a poor and violent household where he and his ten siblings assemble drink servers for a handful of cents per unit. It’s here he learns from his abusive step-father the first of the sets of rules that will guide his life. Kelly dreams of the gold-crowned Centrepoint Tower, Australia’s “Eiffel Tower”, our “Statue of Liberty”. Opening in 1981 when he’s about 14, he sees on TV a barman using his drink servers. “I’m in Centrepoint,” he writes ecstatically, “my fingerprints are in the barman’s mouth. He’s tasting me in spirit”. His first forays to the Fortitude Valley gay bars are shadowed by rumours of the disease spreading in Sydney. But he soon finds himself drawn south, falling in with a crowd of New Romantics scabbing the streets and stealing drinks on the the city’s gay Golden Mile: Oxford Street.

“This life is too hard for happiness,” Kelly writes, but “too exciting to be miserable. There’s a wilderness here and a feeling of possibility”. Just as threat lurks everywhere — gangs of youths throwing gays off the seaside cliffs, dangerous pimps, the disease — so do angels, like the ill man Quoll who Kelly befriends, or the Opera Lady who sails down Oxford Street freeing the ghosts of the departed. Kelly creates a menagerie fit for an urban mythology “both space age and medieval”. There are minotaurs, roads and towers gilded with gold, Pied Pipers, hidden rooms paneled with mirrors, a host of freaks and omens that emerge from the shadows. There’s talk of alternate universes, porous boundaries between worlds. The book’s electrifying first half dwells in this uncanny realm of possibility, where Death might surprise you around the corner, but it could equally be love or the ecstasy of a great fuck. Its second takes a hard swerve akin to Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius. Like Coleman’s work, its most speculative elements are grounded by the truth of the experience of stigma. Also like Coleman, it’s violent and queasy and, when justice is served, quite a lot of fun.

Where are we? Were we knocked into a different timeline? When did we depart from something like memoir and enter into something … else? Kelly’s play with genre provokes questions of determination and contingency, or, as Kit might have it, the “vicissitudes” that push one society down one path, and those elsewhere down another. Kelly’s medico-fascist apartheid dystopia may be campy — think Stranger Things set during the Black Death — but its chill and fury lie in the fact that these things have really happened and continue to happen elsewhere and elsewhen. Consider mPox, another disease that in the West has become more prevalent in queer communities; it was renamed from Monkey Pox to reduce stigma. Consider COVID-19, and how the disease itself and the response to it exposed wounds that run deep through society along lines of race and class. Consider any border or wall or barbed wire fence or no man’s land, holding undesirables at bay in the name of security. Host City answers: we are most secure when we are together.

These disparate elements are welded together in unholy alloy by Kelly’s prose. Sustained imagery like the Centrepoint, “a needle on the record of the turning universe”, takes an initially aspirational symbol and turns it into something much more sinister. He is unsparing in the brutality of the disease and the violence of hatred. The action is heightened and fabulous, like the queers of Oxford Street leaping into the fray to defend one of their own:

Rent boys unfurl their studded belts and coil them about their fists. Dykes swing their keys like truncheons. Destiny seethes, “I fucken hate skinheads,” slips off her high heels and wields them like scythes. She sees me extract my box-cutter. “Don’t be a dickhead,” she says, acknowledging me for the first time. “Put the knife away.”

Elsewhere he casts a soft, delicate light on his characters and spaces, gilding them in warm memory, like the shelves at Gold Bar which:

glow in a soft pink light that picks out the jewel-like tones of the pretty bottles, making them look like exotic birds in an aviary. Greens, yellows, and rubies. Glowing bottles of brown and amber scotch squat on the top shelf like bantam hens.

All that glitters may not be gold. In fact, it might be better.

Gay rating: 5/5 for queer characters, relationships, sex, themes and history.