Robert's Public and Private Lives

This post is based on media interviews conducted around the time Robert Lord Diaries was published in October 2023.

Interviewer: What are your thoughts about diaries as a genre, and Robert Lord’s use of them?

Chris: I love the intensity of a diary, and the way it can offer a new perspective on a person. Robert was often seen as sociable and gregarious, but his diaries show a hesitancy about his relationships, his writing, and even his self-worth. He endlessly reworked his plays, but he wrote each diary entry only once. Robert wove a narrative about his friends, family and surroundings. He was adept at capturing a feeling, and he could be marvellously arch, but he was astute and clever without being unkind.

Robert Lord during the late 1970s.

Diaries give texture to the way we see the world, and they show us how the past felt for those who lived there. Robert’s diaries tell of being a playwright during the 1970s and 80s, and he describes what it was like being a gay man in the years either side of Homosexual Law Reform. Robert  learned about the spread of AIDS, which he initially called ‘gay cancer’; he watched friends die, and in 1992 he too succumbed.

I: What about his Wellington and New York lives, and the frankness with which he talks about his life in America?

C: The diaries tell of the years that followed the 1960s counterculture. We read about the arty life of Wellington in the mid-1970s, and Robert wrote about his Clifton Terrace flat. ‘My apartment had crooked floors, an old gas stove, a gas copper in lieu of a washing machine. We bought a fridge at an auction. My friend Tim kept it full of lobsters, which he dove for off the rocky coast. Many people lived there from time to time. For several weeks a group of hippies camped in the living room. We called them the Afghanistanians, presumably because they’d been there.’

Robert at Clifton Terrace, 1972.

These years of social experimentation were mild compared with dirty, dangerous, frenetic New York, a place for socialising and experimentation, easy sex and new friendships. Robert wrote about being ‘plunged’ at the baths there, and ‘blown’ in bookstalls and saunas, and he recounted  his friends’ drug use and his own. Partying on Fire Island was an iconic gay experience. Robert tells of his New York ‘family’, a group of gay men and their sympathetic straight friends. Former lover Jay Funk had exasperating qualities, but these gave way to valued emotional support when Robert was frazzled.

Jay in Robert's New York apartment in 1985.

I: What did Robert make of New Zealand then?

C: The contrast between New York and New Zealand is mind-blowing. Robert gave his sexuality free rein in New York, but New Zealand was a place to conceal this aspect of himself because his traditionally-minded relatives lived here. While inner-city Wellington was a liberal enclave, Robert found New Zealand to be a generally conservative place during the 1970s and 80s. Muldoon’s incipient totalitarianism bothered him intensely. Wellington did not always appeal: he described the city as ‘neurotic’. Christchurch was oddly empty (‘a great deal goes on behind drawn curtains in Christchurch. All the people must be doing something’), and Dunedin was ‘like visiting your grandmother. But I like it’.

Robert (right) with an unidentified friend in New York, 1985.

I: What else do his diaries tell us about what it was like to be a gay man at that time?

C: Gay men’s self-making certainly changed after gay liberation. Robert drew upon a gay lib vibe in his life and work. He rejected rigid gendered ideals and he challenged the idea that sexual desire is fixed or static. Jet aircraft enlarged the global scope of gay communities during the 1970s, providing men with novel experiences and and enhancing the circulation of new ideas. Robert travelled the world a lot, spending time in New Zealand, Australia, the US and the UK.

He was somewhat opaque about his own HIV diagnosis. Readers of his diaries do not realise he is retrieving drug therapies until quite some time after the regimen began. A while later, Robert says he is unsure how to tell friends about his illness and impending death. There is some disagreement, among those who knew him, about the extent to which he talked about AIDS privately – but he never did so publicly. Jay Funk poured his energy into AIDS advocacy, but Robert's diaries say nothing about Jay's activism.

Robert's messy desk in the New York apartment.

I: So how do Robert Lord’s plays fit into all of this?

C: Robert’s refreshing frankness might be surprising to New Zealand playgoers who are most familiar with Robert’s ‘living room dramas’: Joyful and Triumphant and Bert and Maisy. These plays have subversive elements, critiquing suburban life, family expectations, social conformity and outsider status, but they are not obviously gay. Other works are much more queer in their plots and characters: Balance of Payments, Meeting Place, Gitter and Spit, China Wars [see here]. Robert Lord’s characters often swap places: someone who appears to be straight turns out to be queer, someone who seems queer has a straight relationship, or the most conservative man ends up wearing a dress. AIDS does not appear, though, in any of his plays.

* This script is assembled from interviews between Chris Brickell and David Herkt, Melissa Carey and others.