I'd pretty much given up trying to find him when a friend's work colleague invited me to join the closed Facebook group "Lost Gay Sydney". HIV cast a cloud over the gay club scene in the mid-80s, and some people told me that Trough Man had been a casualty. It didn't feel dangerous, but it felt positively unsafe in a good way." "It was this feeling of being on the edge. Trough Man was just one of many characters who made gatherings like the annual Mardi Gras' Sleaze balls and the famous RAT parties such colourful events.Īs Tim Ritchie, a DJ from the time, reminisced: "The rules didn't apply. "He was kind of nameless and a little bit mysterious … he never said a word." A time when the rules didn't apply "You'd just hear sounds, you'd get to the urinal, and there'd be this body in front of you rolling around, wanting you to piss on him. "In the old days at the showground parties, you'd go into the toilets and someone would always twist off the neon lights, you'd get there and it would be really dark," says artist Gareth Ernst.
It became quite a detective story, and I was led to an eyewitness who told me what it was like to encounter Trough Man at a club. Would it be considered infantile, if not outright offensive? The initial approach usually began with: "I know all gay people don't know all other gay people. When I started asking around Sydney's gay community, I was unsure how they would take my line of questioning. Trough Man was a regular fixture at gay-friendly dance parties in Sydney in the 80s. Online I found a lot of material about Trough Man: a short film, a Wikipedia page, and a few links that we can't share for obvious reasons, but you can look up yourself if you're interested. I was intrigued, and started to make some inquiries. The Trough Man story seemed to have similar powers.
It didn't really suck - it sounded better every year and if you ever wanted to give a party a lift, disco music always worked a treat, in any era. I grew up in the "disco sux" era, though I never wore a badge. I came across the story gradually over the years, at social functions like dinner parties, as people got a bit drunker and the talk got more interesting. This character would lie down in the male urinals at dance parties in the 1980s and enjoy a long golden shower. If Sydney ever had a superhero, maybe it was Trough Man.
Before you go any further: this story contains content some readers may find offensive.