‘I needed to travel to the other side of the world to discover a truth about myself’

     Image: Courtesy of Dave Urquhart 2015

Dave Urquhart - artist, activist, local fashion icon, former cab driver and hustler in the rag trade - is a personality that refuses to be contained or stifled.

When, as a young man, his mother discovered that he was having sex with other men, he was presented with an ultimatum – change his way of life or find somewhere else to live. He moved out the next day, never to return, and in doing so discovered a world that he would ‘inhabit without fear.’

Dave Urquhart experienced the first real joys of his adult life when he ‘fell in with a bad crowd’, in his words. The wry crackle in his voice betrays a tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Urquhart became aware that he was different from others around him in his early teens, though repressive postwar Australian society hadn’t equipped him with a word to describe it. ‘Gay wasn’t a word that was ever used. I just realised I was attracted to other boys,’ he told Nick Cook in an interview with DNA. ‘I was swimming and mucking around with a family friend and thought, ‘Oh good God, what’s happening down there?’

He grew up being told by his adoptive mother Enid - an unmarried registered nurse at Sydney’s Prince of Wales Hospital - that she was his Aunty. His Mum and Dad, he had been led to believe, had died in an accident. It was not until he was 23 that he learned that this was a lie.

School was traumatic - he was beaten by the nuns, bullied by his peers and was sexually abused by a priest when he was 14. ‘After one more year of Catholic brutality I’d had enough,’ he reports, leaving school altogether in 1956. A video piece which he produced for IDAHOTB ( International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia) in 2010 entitled The Boy Who Said No is a raw reflection on his troubled start in life.

Catholic themes loom large in many of his photographic stills and photomontage pieces, hanging throughout the modest timber workers’ cottage where he lives in Sydney’s now-stylish neighbourhood of Newtown. In one frame, a twisted self-portrait, Urquhart’s recogniseable thick glasses, broad nose and toothy grin appear on the robed body of Mary of Nazareth in a cathartic act of sacrilege. The clerical monochrome stands out among an otherwise kaleidoscopic art collection, which drapes the walls and corners of almost every room in the house.

Perhaps surprisingly, Urquhart retains a fondness for Catholic kitsch. Among the trinkets adorning the various surfaces of the kitchen is a bottle of holy water. With its plastic casing moulded in a likeness of the Mother of Christ, the sacramental vessel still wears its six-franc price tag from the gift shop of a pilgrimage site in Lourdes, France.

Life for Urquhart began to improve once he was safe from the horrors of schooling. He easily made friends after joining the workforce - holding a succession of menial jobs. The death of his grandmother, Maude, the closest companion he had in his adoptive family, however, was a bitter blow. Less than a month later, he drove headlong into a brick wall while on the way home from a party - an accident which left him hospitalised and isolated for most of ‘59.

He took his first job in the fashion industry post-recovery - as a door-to-door salesman selling ‘women’s undergarments, better known now as intimate apparel.’ ‘I thought of it as flogging bras and girdles,’ Urquhart muses on his website, ‘a rag trade version of being a fitter and turner.’ Working in the industry brought him into contact with more homosexuals, and perhaps more importantly, allowed him to save enough money to go overseas for a year. ‘I had never known such freedom. I needed to travel to the other side of the world to discover a truth about myself. I was gay!’

Years after this life-changing trip, the penny finally dropped with Urquhart’s adoptive mother Enid about his homosexuality, who responded by kicking him out of home. ‘She said I had to go because some of my friends were not very savoury types,” he says, following with a mischievous pregnant pause. ‘I actually thought some of them were very savoury, but in a different way to what she meant.’

Urquhart and adoptive mother Enid were ultimately unable to reconcile their differences

He immediately moved to Kings Cross, a neighbourhood which enjoyed a century-long run as Sydney’s main red light district. It was 1968 and Australia was gripped by social upheaval, while political unrest raged abroad. Hippie was approaching its high watermark in the country. An unrelated mission to help a friend with release from prison after a run-in with the law set off a chain of chance meetings, pulling Urquhart into the orbit of counter-cultural life at the Wayside Chapel Theatre and Stanley Palmer’s Culture Palace. It was in this milieu that Urquhart kindled a number of long-term friendships and a lifelong affection for subversive performance art.

Elsewhere in the neighbourhood, the Rex Hotel was the popular gay drinking hole, while the Purple Onion in nearby Darlinghurst - operated by famed entrepreneur and drag queen Ken “Kandy” Johnson - was a Sunday scene favourite. ‘It was kind of a burlesque drag cabaret. It was fantastic,” Urquhart recounted to DNA. ‘It was quite little and very dark and a lot of people would get into drag.’ On the other hand, a bar called French’s was ‘an absolute cesspit’ where ‘you had to keep moving or your feet would stick to the floor.’ Urquhart also recalls a sex-on-premises venue named Signal Bar. ‘It was pretty raunchy and I’m sure it was illegal. I got turned away from there one night because I was too well-dressed.’

Wayside Chapel regulars, Cafe Astoria; John Jeffrey ran the theatre at the Chapel while Margaret Figuccio was a cast member in the first ever season of Hair: The Musical; Dave Urquhart on far-right

Image: Dave  Urquhart

Homosexuality in New South Wales remained illegal at the time, with homosexuals regularly targeted with police violence, arbitrary detention and entrapment. Urquhart describes the gay culture as remaining underground and closeted until about 1973 when Gay Liberation got going. Interestingly, he describes the public beats in Western Sydney a place where gay men came together for social interaction and not just the anonymous sex that they were later become more purely associated with: ‘We’d hang around there for maybe an hour or more just chatting because there weren’t things like coffee shops and there were no gay bars in the suburbs. When I look back on it I find it very hard to believe the population at large didn’t know what was going on.’

Despite travelling extensively in Europe, the USA and Mexico, Urquhart has never given a thought to settling elsewhere. ‘My roots, my social life were embedded here. I’ve not even considered moving interstate here.’

Stratford, United Kingdom, 1963

  Sicily, 1976

  USA, 1976

Carabiniero, Spain, 1991

Returning from two years overseas in May ’78 and broke, he was driving a taxi to survive. Urquhart was was still completing a shift on the night of the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, a street "festival" demanding an end to discrimination, police harassment and the repeal of all anti-homosexual laws. It was late in the night when he got word that participants in the event had been brutally beaten by police, with 53 arrests made.’We were there all night collecting bail money and trying to get people out of the police station. We knew they were being assaulted in there because we could literally hear them screaming.’

It was a galvanising experience for Urquhart, and he became actively involved in subsequent court cases and protests. Likewise, when the onset of the HIV epidemic enacted a heavy toll on Sydney’s gay community, he became directly involved through People Living With HIV AIDS (PLWHA) where he helped establish, and became the first editor of Talkabout Magazine. ‘Too many funerals for too many friends,’ he says, with a slight exhale. ‘I am very fortunate to have survived.’

Urquhart remains a dynamic presence in community events and actions. One example over the past decade is Reclaim the Streets (RTS), a Sydney-based collective with an ideal of community ownership of public spaces, and opposed to the car as the dominant means of transport. He first stumbled upon an RTS action in a local park while walking his dog. Like the first Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, RTS events are envisioned simultaneously as celebration and protest. Urquhart quotes the anarchist philosopher Emma Goldman: ‘If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution.’ He has tirelessly documented RTS actions as the collective’s event photographer.

Reclaim the Streets, 2015

Image: Dave Urquhart

He continues to be creatively inspired. He was an energising force in the 2203 art collective, a project in which he was the oldest member by over 50 years. ‘I appreciated the value of being in a collective, not always engaged in the same project but being with a creatively charged group of like-minded artists working across various media.’ He describes himself as an ‘interloper’, generally not fully aware of the existing group dynamic but happy to contribute. ‘Honestly, I have always felt comfortable and welcomed,’ he says. ‘If a group's ideals and practices fit with mine why not give it go?’

---

Urquhart is interrupted by his small dog, who has been roused by some unexpected visitors in the garden. ‘George… please!’ You can almost hear his eyes rolling at the resident border terrier’s fits of high pitched growling at the window - a predictable escalation following the sound of skidding paws on slate tiles. ‘The possums are back’, he says in something between a sigh and a chuckle.

2203 Collective stages a performance of 'Intimacy Ambulance', with Urquhart moonlighting in the role of 'patient', Sydney, 2011

Image: Dave Urquhart