THE COLONEL'S OUTING | Birth Of A Colonel

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Director's Statement

Birth Of A Colonel

Production Notes

Birth of a Colonel
Steve Attwood, author of the short story “A Man’s Man”, shares the Colonel’s origins.

The story originally started when I was studying creative writing with Owen Marshall in Timaru, and he was taking us through a unit about putting on a voice that is not your own voice. One of the challenges was to write as a very old person.

At the time I was doing the course, I was dashing back to Christchurch at weekends to work in a gay bar - because I was a poor student and I needed money! While I was in the bar, a guy came in who obviously expected all gay bars to be staffed by beautiful young men. I went to serve him, he ignored me and said to the other barman, “how come you've got such an old c**t working behind the bar?”

I was so angry, and was thinking that that weekend I had to write a story with an old man's voice.

So I rushed home at 3 o clock in the morning after my stint in the bar and wrote the bones of what was to become "A Man's Man". It evolved from there. So it actually was written as an "old guys can be sexy and attractive too, thank you very much!"

Pictured: Steve Attwood (right), with partner Steve Auld at their civil union.

Steve Attwood and partner Steve Auld at their civil union

Some years after that story was written, I saw an advertisement for an American publisher that was producing an anthology of gay short love stories. And I thought, how am I going to compete in that market where there'll be thousands?

Then I thought, “I know, I've got that story about the two old guys in the rest home.” And it sold, it sold to America, and was published in the anthology.

My mum was a geriatric nurse for many years, so I used to go and sing in the hospitals to entertain the old folks, so I was really familiar with the atmosphere and the language and the personalities in those places, so those sort of background things all added colour to the story.

I think it’s one of the sad things in our culture that you get over 40 and you start becoming invisible in the gay world. It's a healthy thing to be aware that our people grow up, they have lives away from the bars and the clubs and the lycra and the youthful gym bodies.

I'd like to see that redressed, and in what is now "The Colonel’s Outing", I see that as part of redressing that invisibility.

I think companionship is important to anybody. I don’t think we're geared or have evolved as an animal to be on our own. I don’t think we handle being on our own very well.

I remember the first time I lived in Wellington back in the early 1990s, and I went to the tenth anniversary of New Zealand’s homosexual law reform celebrations. One of the things I did then as a gay journalist was deliberately do interviews with gay couples that had been together for a really long time, because there was a perception that it wasn’t worth giving us equal rights in relationship matters because we couldn’t hold onto relationships anyway - and it’s a myth.

Stories like this are a nice way of showing that we as gay men have lives, we have loves, we have feelings and deeply held beliefs – and it’s nice to grow old with somebody.

WATCH STEVE'S INTERVIEW AS A VIDEO CLIP BELOW