Why the personal has always been political for this revered thinker

ESSAYS
Righting My World: Essays from the past half-century
Dennis Altman
Monash University Publishing, $39.99

“For me writing has been a crucial way of making sense of myself,” Dennis Altman explains in Righting My World, connecting that side of his career to “what leads others into a search for spiritual meaning, or, perhaps, therapy”. Seen in such a light, his collection of essays and articles written over more than half a century – from 1969 to 2025 – is not only an account of the changing times in the Western world from the vantage point of a politically astute intellectual, but also a kind of autobiography.

He declares his concerns upfront: “My continuing love/hate relationship with the United States, my interest in global sexual politics, and the intersection of culture and politics.” He goes on to probe what it’s meant for him to be Jewish, to be homosexual, and to have travelled the world to speak on behalf of the socially marginalised. He reflects on what it was like to have been an academic before universities became heavily corporatised and competitive, and to have now stepped out of the heady fray of the lecture theatre, where he was one of the very best, as I discovered when he righted my world during my time as a student at Monash University. Now, as a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe, he occupies a largely advisory role.

This selection of his writings (rightings!) comes from an eclectic and estimable range of publications, including The Conversation, Meanjin, The Monthly, The Australian Book Review and this masthead. It introduces a diverse range of topics through which he tackles the wider themes around which his thinking has pivoted, incorporating a revisiting of past issues equally pertinent to the present.

For example, his essay Escaping the Tribe?, written in 2009 for Overland, addresses the question currently occupying headlines both locally and globally: what it means to be Jewish in the modern world. He nominates Israel’s three-week Gaza offensive of 2008-9, known as Operation Cast Lead, and his “revulsion at the death and suffering” then inflicted on the Palestinian people as the cause of his ambivalence about Israel and what drove him to write the essay in the first place.

His everyday experience of belonging to “the tribe”, a status that should provide comfort, simply leaves him feeling alienated. “Jews in countries like Australia still behave as if they belong to a persecuted and vulnerable community, which would be weakened by any internal dissent,” he writes. “There is little understanding of the community’s relative strength, especially as viewed by the smaller and far less resourced Palestinian population.” Of his day-to-day encounters, he proffers anecdotally, “I have encountered casual antisemitism only several times in my life”, adding, significantly, “but almost every Jew is constantly primed to suspect it”.

Equally born of personal experience are his deliberations about being a member of the so-called “gay community”, for which – following the publication of his first book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, in 1971 – he has become an internationally renowned spokesperson.

Largely taken from magazines specifically pitched to the “gay market” (Campaign, Outrage, Christopher Street, The Gay & Lesbian Review), Altman’s essays on the subject introduce ways of writing about gay culture that still only occasionally find their way into the mainstream.

He provides an extended and explicit introduction to the topic in his 1985 Report from the Sexual Trenches, written against the background of the emerging AIDS epidemic. To attempt to cite from it here would require oodles of asterisks, although Altman’s approach is measured and observational rather than pornographic. He is at pains throughout to ensure that readers understand that any view of the “gay community” as a homogenous one makes about as much sense as regarding the “straight community”, with all its racial, ethnic, socio-economic, political and other differences, in the same way. He repeatedly (and, for some, provocatively) emphasises the need to distinguish between one’s “gender expression and sexual identity”.

He also takes us between the lines to discuss Don Dunstan’s premiership in South Australia during the 1960s and ’70s, guides us across the gay scenes in Los Angeles and Paris, writes perceptively about Tennessee Williams, Sumner Locke Elliott, Gore Vidal and Agatha Christie, and ponders the same-sex marriage conundrum. Did the fact that “even radical queers saw the debate as about equality and acceptance, whatever their personal doubts about the institution”, he asks, simply mean that support for it is “a way of taming homosexuality”?

Having earlier worried about his shift from being part of a social movement to finding himself institutionally embedded alongside the enemy, Altman ends his sometimes biting, sometimes funny, but always absorbing anthology of learned thought bubbles by surveying his life from the grand old age of 80. What he sees provides a provocative insight into what the lessons of the past can teach us about the turmoil of the present.

“I came of age politically during the Vietnam War,” he writes, “and there are echoes of that time today, in the mass protests against Israel and the febrile politics of the United States.” There was hope for progress then and there is now, he insists. And he leaves us with an appreciation of the many ways in which the personal and the political are two faces of the same coin.

His forthright, fluent and insightful commentaries are both and, in making sense of himself, he makes good sense about the state of the world as it’s been since the 1960s, even if climate change curiously remains off the agenda and his excavations of the links between culture and politics don’t go far enough. A further edition of the book would be very welcome: there’s much more to right.

Dennis Altman is in conversation with Marieke Hardy about Righting My World at Readings Carlton, Lygon Street, Melbourne, on Thursday, February 12, at 6pm

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