My Dahling
A friend of mine says that Roald Dahl is an ‘icky’ writer; you don’t read his stories as much as you squelch through them. You can’t get through The Twits (1980) without crawling through Mr Twit’s beard, picking cornflakes and crumbs of cheese out of your hair.
Dahl finds the delightful in the disgusting. He remembers what it feels like to be ten years old and staring at a crushed snail, or a glob of snot, with squirming fascination. I am thinking of a scene in My Uncle Oswald (1979), my favourite Dahl novel. Oswald describes the pleasure of eating live oysters: the way their bodies slide down his throat, slimy, decadent. How they wriggle in his stomach. ‘You have an unsavoury predilection for the obscene,’ notes his dining companion.
I love how suggestive that word is. Obscene. A blend of the sensual and the grotesque. At its best, Dahl’s writing is thoroughly obscene. Even his children’s stories are laced with something forbidden. Anjelica Huston picked that up in her performance of the Grand High Witch in The Witches (1990): she beckons, fingers flicking at crotch height. Hips rolling. Breath fluttering.
Dahl says My Uncle Oswald is the longest and dirtiest story he has ever told. It reads like the lovechild between Dahl and Playboy magazine: Oswald is a wealthy bachelor and professional pleasure-seeker. His personality is propped up by luxury cars, expensive wine, and his liaisons with women. These escapades are recorded in his diaries, which are later discovered and published by his adoring nephew. In his standout adventure Oswald travels the globe, stealing the sperm of artists and intellectuals; or Yasmin, his co-conspirator, does. She drugs each man with the world’s most powerful aphrodisiac, leaving them violently horny, and lets them fuck her until they’re spent. She brings the used condoms to Oswald, who freezes the contents in liquid nitrogen. The preserved spunk is then sold to wealthy fans, who wish to conceive ‘genius’ babies.
The scheme reeks of moral corruption. Yasmin is the only character in a position to give full consent to anything. But even this brand of wickedness has a seductive power. Maybe it’s got something to do with flipping the power dynamics; all these powerful men are at Yasmin’s mercy, and she derives great enjoyment at the thought of fucking her way through Europe’s intelligentsia. Or maybe it’s because Oswald’s plans are so elaborate, and executed with such panache, that there’s a warped joy in watching them succeed. He commits to being bad, which is the root of irresistible charm.
My mum wasn’t to know any of this. She found Oswald at the hairdresser’s one day, in one of those subscription boxes where you order gifts like slinkies and glow-in-the-dark stars. All she registered was the name ROALD DAHL in big black letters.
Here’s what she missed:
● the voluptuous beetle on the cover
● three suggestive words in the book’s blurb (‘debauched’, ‘fornicator’, ‘erotic’)
● that all of Dahl’s stories are obscene, indulging in the revolting
This was new, unsettling territory. An author that had seen me through my primary school years had repackaged himself into something erotic, just as I was developing an interest in sex. What’s even more disturbing is that it made its way into my hands through a parent; family and sexuality aren’t supposed to overlap like that.
Regardless, I will be eternally grateful for this oversight. It was the first book I read that talked about sex. Even better, it talked about desire, linking sexual acts with pleasure. Some people discover this through nudie mags, wandering the web in incognito mode, or the underwear displays in the middle of Myer. Each of these things accompanied by bolts of joy.
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School is a peculiar kind of torture for the blossoming queer. There’s the languid unfurling of adolescent bodies, newly-sexed flowers indulging in their own sweetness, their freshly-discovered softness. Mine was of the same-gender, Catholic variety. I would watch the clusters of girls tanning their legs on the oval and feel myself burning. I thought the Consecrated Host would sizzle right through my tongue. Faith stuck to everything. What strange purity they corralled us with; our hemlines kept to a modest length, our hair and nails scrutinised at surprise inspections. Our heads bowed in solemn prayer during homeroom.
G never bowed her head. She compromised by resting her chin on her hands. I was obsessed with the way her curls gathered at the back of her neck. With her androgynous face – the slender nose offset by the structured cut of her jaw – she reminded me of the Madonna in the school chapel. I wondered if it was really Jesus under that blue mantle, leaning into his feminine grace. G’s homeroom was next to mine, and in the mornings I would linger by the window to see if she was there. If she was, it was going to be a good day; I’d get to see her in English Lit, unless she wagged and hid in the library, filling her sketchbook with drawings. We became friends over a shared love of books and old movies. We swapped our favourite novels—hers The Catcher in the Rye (1951), mine My Uncle Oswald. Speaking with her felt like a benediction; my darling had found the secret passageway into my soul.
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We first meet Yasmin in a bakery. Even with sugar and doughnut all over her face, she is a living aphrodisiac. As Oswald notes:
She was absolutely soaked in sex […] she might just as well have been stark naked
[…] Not even in Paris had I met a female who inspired such instant lust.
Yasmin maintains this seductive quality across the gender spectrum. In one scene, Oswald disguises her as a man; her breasts are smoothed beneath bandages and a silk waistcoat. A felt trilby sets off the curve in her upper lip, the one that sends Oswald wriggling all over his seat. But the reason why she’s been dressed this way is much less alluring. Oswald is keen to add Marcel Proust, a known gay man, to his sperm collection. He refuses to take Yasmin’s place, horrified at the idea of being ‘inverted’. They compensate by strapping a banana to Yasmin’s inner thigh and drugging Proust with a double dose of aphrodisiac, hoping he’ll be too horny to spot the difference.
It’s here that Dahl exposes his disgust for queer men. Proust is painted as a vain, snobbish hypochondriac and anti-Semite – even though Dahl himself was ardently racist and anti-Semitic. I am still learning to reconcile this part of his character with the grandfatherly figure I respect. It is an uncomfortable truth that deeply-prejudiced people are capable of creating art that moves us.
But parts of My Uncle Oswald belong to me now, transformed to suit my own needs. I used to think about Yasmin’s drag performance a lot. Especially her legs. The novel is set during the 1910s, but I thought she would look better as a French aristocrat, Rococo style. I put her in breeches and switched her socks for a pair of stockings that accentuated the shape of her calves. Blue is definitely her colour, I thought, securing a garter underneath her knee. She sprang to mind again when I performed my own gender deception; experimenting with local theatre, I found myself playing male characters. I thought I made a very handsome boy. I liked the way men’s clothes changed my shape. I found myself sitting with my legs open, accommodating some imaginary body part.
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You talk about her a lot, said Mum, adjusting the rear-view mirror.
I like to surround myself with interesting things, I shrugged. Books, clothes. People. They’re all the same to me.
Mum pursed her lips and kept driving.
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During the night, I would lie back and think of G. I went hurtling through space, melting into the infinite blue. Stars collected in my arms. I bit into the skin of Venus and liquid fire ran down my throat. I was dazzled. My body unspooled itself. It felt indecent and sinful and I would not stop.
The following day, I would sit next to G in English Lit, vibrating with desire. I wondered if she could smell it on me.
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My dad, of all people, introduced me to The True Story of Eskimo Nell (1975). One of the earliest Ozploitation films, it’s a confused patchwork of slapstick comedy, Western buddy flick and softcore porno. Two drifters, Deadeye Dick and Mexico Pete, travel around Australia in search of Eskimo Nell, a legendary sex goddess. They’re a disappointing pair: Dick is fascinated by the idea of sex, and what he imagines it would be like. But the possibility of actually doing it leaves him paralysed and nervously breaking wind. Pete is a Don Juan wannabe, but I doubt he’s bothered to look at a clitoris up close, let alone know what to do with one. I always felt they were unworthy of Nell’s talents.
The film draws loosely from The Ballad of Eskimo Nell, a naughty rhyming folk poem. It’s so vulgar that no one will print it, though it continues to be passed on by word of mouth; in the original story, Dick is a sex machine who can fuck his way through 40 women in one sitting. Director Richard Franklin’s adaptation keeps that obscene energy. I think Dad had forgotten about the sex and topless women when he showed it to me, but the raunchy parts were my favourite. It boasts a full-frontal shot of Australian sex symbol, Abigail Rogan—the only one she posed for in her entire career. All golden blonde and big eyes, a tan line in the shape of her underwear, she’s a goddess in the dust. I couldn’t appreciate her full glory while Dad was sitting next to me. We both averted our gaze, too shy to look in each other’s presence. We got through the dirty bits by pointing out things happening in the background, speaking over the top of giggles and moans.
As unpleasant as he is, Dick holds a special place in my heart. He isn’t getting any sex, but he cultivates his own understanding of how it should feel. He learns about pleasure by telling himself stories: getting into bed with Nell is like riding a wild horse bareback and at full gallop down the side of a mountain. It’s like being caught in a boat in the middle of a storm, the waves propelling you so high you think you might crash into the clouds.
Queer desire is often framed like this: internalised, channelled into fantasies. You pine after physical touch but struggle to initiate it. Instead, you learn to practice intimacy in other ways. Dick’s solution is to become a voyeur and live through other people’s bodies, specifically Pete’s: when we first meet him, Dick is camped in the shadows, watching a woman get undressed. But when Pete enters the scene, he doesn’t look away. In fact, he moves closer to the open window, risking the chance of getting caught. We flick between the kissing couple and Dick’s fixated expression. Even when the woman leaves his field of vision, Dick keeps his eyes on Pete, who slowly removes his boots and hat, a brief striptease. It’s later revealed that Dick has been following Pete around the country, watching him in action. He even knows that Pete goes cross-eyed when he orgasms.
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How G and I practiced intimacy:
● Curating playlists especially for each other, which we burned onto CDs and USBs
● Finding the other’s face in the middle of a group conversation and holding prolonged eye contact
● Displaced physical contact. When G was thinking, she would put her index and middle fingers to her lips. Sometimes she would laugh behind them while she held my gaze and the vibrations became a sonic kiss
During our first year of university, she kissed me for real.
Are you ready, she asked, pressing me into the couch.
She tasted like a supernova.
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There’s a scene in The True Story of Eskimo Nell where Pete has arranged for two sex workers to spend the night with him and Dick. It’s the closest that Dick’s ever been to touching a woman. Rigid with nerves, he retreats to his safe place: watching Pete work his magic. Pete is kissing his partner, twirling her out of her corset. Dick can’t keep his eyes off him. Overwhelmed, he assumes his customary position outside the house and looking in, cocooned in a blanket.
When G and I first kissed, I felt like Dick. Part of me was participating in the intimacy, and another was looking on. I was remembering how I had seen this act performed in films: Catwoman licking Batman’s lips in Batman Returns (1992). Roger and Eve purring between kisses in North by Northwest (1959). I mimicked them, hoping I was doing the right thing. I even paraphrased Uncle Oswald: sofas are a terrible romping ground. At my request, we moved prematurely to the bed. It felt so good and I was so overwhelmed.
Can we stop, I asked. I’m so sorry.
It’s okay, we can stop. Don’t be sorry.
I’m so sorry.
I had to stop. I was unspooling.
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DICK: I mucked it up […] It’s all that waiting. You can’t wait so long for something and
not muck it up.
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G and I never gave this relationship an official name. To her, it was the next natural step in our friendship, something fun for us to explore together. In my head, I found myself referring to her as ‘my girlfriend’. I wanted some way of tethering her to me, in case she floated away.
We were kissing for five months. I would swing past her workplace during lunch so she could leave invisible buds all over my skin. I could still feel them hours later, unfurling in the moonlight. I’m grateful for the small intimacies that stayed, like the way she opens her arms for a hug every time we meet, and how we both agree that Gene Wilder’s performance of Willy Wonka is better than Johnny Depp’s. Sometimes we’ll be talking, and she’ll suddenly ruffle my hair; not running her fingers through it, like you do before you kiss someone. More like the way you’d pet an old dog, a faithful companion that has stood beside you for years.
But it took what felt like an aeon to accept the loss of that sexual touch. I looked at her and felt the wanting growling in my belly. Some new part of me had stretched itself awake, hungry and with nowhere to go.
This essay was originally published in Issue #122 of Voiceworks.