BY MYLES OAKEY, 2016 CUTCOMMON YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR
Regan is HIV negative.
Regan is on PrEP.
Regan has been recently tested.
“Whenever I have sex with someone, I’ll ask those three things,” Regan Lynch says.
“It doesn’t always happen beforehand. Sometimes it will happen during – or sometimes afterwards, if I’m completely honest.” The singer is unable to hold back a brief smile.
“To alleviate anxieties, we have a conversation.”
This is the everyday life of queer-identifying musician and writer Regan Lynch. I don’t mean to suggest that it happens every day, but that it is his everyday; his reality, his mode of living. In his new solo cabaret show Regan Lynch Does it in Public, the artist aims to share with audiences the hilarity, anxiety, and liberation of the queer sexual experience. It’s a story that features Regan’s own life before and after being on the drug PrEP. The antiretroviral medication is said to drastically lower the risk of HIV, and Regan is one of up to 2000 Queensland men taking this as part of a $6 million trial.
Regan, who was nominated for a 2015 Matilda Award, grabs his electric guitar, ukulele, angel wings, and fetish-wear in a musical production he describes as not anything like “the Billie Holiday, lounging on the piano, jazz cabaret” – but the “dirty, do-it-yourself, political kind”. In this way, Regan aligns himself with a tradition that deals with serious issues in a satirical way but with social and political immediacy.
Before life on PrEP, the only other option for Regan was PEP – a reactive, rather than pre-emptive, 30-day course drug, which he tells me is far from pleasant.
“I was backpacking with my father [in Thailand]. And I told him I was going to get a massage, which was me actually going to the tourist clinic in Phuket and buying $550 of medication: getting a shot in the arse, and so many other drugs. One of those courses of drugs was PEP.
“I started getting ill. I was travelling and living with my dad in close quarters. I started getting paranoid that I would get very sick; that it would be difficult to travel; that I would have to talk to him about what happened; and that I would return home. And I was in a relationship with someone, too. All of these really ‘fun’, conflicting emotions,” Regan laughs, this time sarcastically.
Yet for Regan, what should be considered a healthy active sex life brings with it a very real anxiety; one which goes to the heart of why a drug like PrEP can change a life.
“Phuket has a high HIV rate. Having that experience happen over there, that’s what scared me the most. I was really unwell for the months after. I was the worst I’ve ever been, mentally. It was barely liveable. I wasn’t sleeping, I was paralysed with fear. That’s how bad it was.
“Now on PrEP, I definitely underestimated the impact being told ‘you’re not going to get HIV now’ would have on someone’s brain; someone who had been told their whole life – before they even knew they were gay – that HIV is something to be terrified of, and if you get it, you will die.
“In that sense, it has had a profound impact on me, and the community at large in relieving us of the fear and anxiety that we’ve had for three or four decades. As a result, it has actually enabled us to experience a kind of liberation that we haven’t felt since before the onset of the AIDS crisis.”
For Regan, part of this liberation includes his public, musical declaration of the private life of a gay man. And although Regan seems to share it with humour and ease, it’s something he’s had to push himself towards. Regan Lynch Does it in Public is his first autobiographical work of this kind – one in which living publicly is driven by political intent.
“The openness is something that I value,” he says.
“The title of the show refers not just to public sex but to having a public persona, putting it out there in the world: how we, as queer people, go about our lives in ways that are not necessarily the same as our straight counterparts.
“I see value in this new wave of sexual liberation that is coming about, and I want to accelerate it and contribute to it. So in performing this show, I’m getting myself out there and talking about it in my own way, and hopefully allowing people to see alternate ways of living and being and having sex that are not monogamous; with a condom; in the bedroom.”
For me, as a heterosexual-identifying man, hearing the stories told in Regan Lynch Does it in Public is an opportunity to gain a new awareness of Regan’s everyday life, and an understanding of how his modes of living are important to him. And for Regan, I think this show means living a public life; something along the lines of his new favourite quote from the late singer George Michael (The Guardian): “Gay people in the media are doing what makes straight people comfortable, and automatically my response to that is to say I’m a dirty filthy f-cker and if you can’t deal with it, you can’t deal with it.”
See Regan Lynch Does it in Public as part of the Anywhere Theatre Festival. from May 4-21 in Betty’s Espresso and Bar, 11 Browning St, West End. All tickets $15, 18+ event.
Image supplied.
