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It wouldn’t be Mardi Gras without Troughman. The legend spoke with Barry Lowe.
One of the true heroes of the Sydney gay scene and an iconic character in his own right is the one and only Troughman. His imitators have attempted to usurp the throne but they are mere pretenders to the King of Piss.
Not that Barry was always known as Troughman. “That title only came about after the 1994 Sleaze Ball.
It was one of the first years we couldn’t put the lights out in the toilets and a journalist with Sydney Star Observer wrote that for the first time, because the lights were on, he got to see this character in the trough properly for the first time. And he nicknamed me Troughman. The name resonated.”
But it wasn’t like he was a newbie. “I did come to piss late by most people’s calculations. I was 28 years old. I was in the basement area of the Mineshaft in New York and saw a guy in a bathtub. I had no idea what he was doing. Later I was sucking someone off and got a mouthful of piss instead of a mouthful of cum. I liked it.
There’d been no planning, no organisation. I’d never thought about it. I’d never done anything like that before. And about 30 minutes later I was in the bathtub myself.” Back in Sydney, he was one of the first handful of men to wear the tell-tale yellow bandanna in his back pocket and began to frequent Signal, the fetish club on Crown Street.
“I was in the toilet there one night watching everyone pissing and I thought, ‘This is all going to waste,’ so I got down and that was it.” A legend was born.
So what’s the attraction? “I reject that it’s about humiliation. It’s not for me, anyway. It’s mutual pleasure, it’s mutual connection. It’s that sexual thing of being with another man doing something fabulous for him. Plus piss tastes great and it feels great on your body.”
Barry’s reputation grew as he gave piss a chance at parties, Signal and even some pubs around the city. “Friends of mine ran the Beresford and they had a canopy over the garden area near the toilets and I was quite popular there for a year or two.
“Occasionally, I’d have people say, ‘Eww, what’s going on down there?’ And, on one occasion, a young guy who was on drugs or whatever looked down at me in the trough and lashed out and kicked me.”
It certainly took courage, even in the libidinous 1980s, to leave himself so vulnerable. “I didn’t need any courage to do it at a big party for the first time,” he says. “I don’t have those kinds of inhibitions.”
Those with longer memories than a goldfish will remember the year that Troughman almost missed Mardi Gras. Rumours abounded that he was short of cash and couldn’t afford the price of admission. Not true.
“What really happened was that I missed the deadline for buying tickets. It was the year there weren’t many available. Gary Dunne, who was editor of Star Observer at the time, thought it would make a good story. Apparently they were inundated with offers to pay for my ticket. It was one of the really great experiences and I wrote a letter to the Star thanking everybody for their support.”
As his reputation grew, so did the demands on his time. One famous movie producer who has worked with Nicole Kidman attempted to put together a one-hour television documentary on Troughman but it fell through.
“I think he was taking it all way too seriously,” Barry says. However, a decade-old, seven-minute film by a lesbian director juxtaposing an interview with the man himself with vox pops of people leaving the Mardi Gras party was shown as recently as last year at an Amsterdam film festival.
And then there’s his unforgettable short performance piece at the Performance Space in 1997. “A director friend set up a tableau of Caravaggio’s Death of a Virgin. I’m lying there surrounded by these weeping people, a suit, a leather man, a lesbian, etc. Our piece was in the second half and during intermission we had a bucket in the toilets and the audience was told, ‘If you piss in this bucket it will be used in a performance later in the night.’ And it was.
The director walked out to Handel’s ‘Largo’ and poured the bucket of piss all over me.”
Over the years, Sons of Troughman have sprung up and urinal real estate has become as rare as a modest house on the harbour foreshore. But he doesn’t view them as competition. “The more the merrier as far as I was concerned. Over the years there’s been friends of mine from locally, interstate and overseas who’ve come to the parties.”
But he’s not big on parties any more. “I just don’t like them. They’re too pristine and clean and everyone’s behaving themselves. You can’t put the lights out in the toilet and security is always there to put a stop to people doing anything. That’s not for me. I go to Headquarters once or twice a month and I still do one-on-ones, three-on-ones, five-on-ones at home, that sort of stuff.”
And to the young guys growing up in more sexually repressive times, he offers advice: “You have to be open to discovering what does it for you. What gets you excited. What makes you feel good.
Don’t carry any inhibitions with you. And if you don’t like it then you don’t have to do it again. If you feel, ‘Oh, I want to try that,’ just get out there and do it.”
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