(courtesy Random Management Instagram)
So much is left unsaid when you’re a queer person coming out to your parents.
You may have rehearsed the conversations a thousand times in your head, imagined how the discussion might go, good or bad and hoped that everything you authentically are will be far more important than long-held assumptions about what you should be.
But those conversations never quite go the way you expect, something that is explored with real insight and empathetic nuance in Homebodies, available as six 10-minute episodes which one of Australia’s public broadcaster, SBS, screened last weekend as an hour-long special.
Creator AB Pobjoy, who describes their work as focusing on “character-driven and emotionally claustrophobic stories, exploring the intersections of gender, family, transmasculinity and queerness”, has infused the paranormal-laced series with the kind of intimate understanding that can only come from someone who has imagined the kinds of conversations referred to above and who has found that a great deal if left unsaid no matter how well you prepare.
The protagonist of the piece, which was co-directed with Harry Lloyd and co-written with Charlotte Mars, is Darcy (Luke Wiltshire) who returns home to his fictional childhood hometown of Torwoo (filming looks to have taken place in Oberon) after his mother Nora, played by Claudia Karvan, whom he has not seen in many years, has a health scare.
Returning home with an urgent reluctance – he cares for his mum deeply it’s clear but there is no much hanging portentously between them, the unsaid conversations tinging every interaction with melancholic regret and a desperate need to reconnect that keeps going unmet – he discovers his mother, a sculptor of some accomplishment, is living as a virtual recluse, the once endless stream of visitors to the beautiful rural property now a thing of the past.
Luke is mystified but soon discovers, in a heartstopping scene that clearly acts as a punctuation to one of the ten-minute episodes, why his mother has uncharacteristically withdrawn from the world.
To his horror and distress, Luke walks into the kitchen to find his pre-transition self, photos of which still line the walls to Luke’s clear discomfort – at one point, you see Luke reflected in one of those photos and it’s a stark delineation of past and present struggling to find some sense of accommodation – sitting at the kitchen table with his mother.
It’s at this point that Homebodies remakes itself in part into a ghost story, and while it’s unclear what Dee (Jazi Hall) really is, Nora says she and Dee have settled on “ghost” for now.
As discoveries go, it’s chilling and in a household filled with the ghosts of the past and a haunting sense of a present undiscovered and unresolved, it’s confronting in ways that leave Darcy reeling, his sense of being rejected by his mother acute since she clearly seems more at ease with Dee than with her son, Darcy.
Dee vacillates between wanting to know herself as she is now and fury at the way Darcy keeps rejecting her even as he tries to find some connection with someone who is, in effect, him.
All three actors bring this quite fantastical and yet intimately, affectingly grounded show to vividly nuanced life, all of them living with a host of things never said which must find some form of expression, however awkward or incomplete, if everyone is to move on.
Being the “ghost, spirit, unresolved trauma – pick your fave” – Dee’s flippant words might be delivered with flippant comic disposability but they carry great emotional weight, too – Dee is the obvious candidate to move on, but as Homebodies progresses with a moving incisiveness from shock to accommodation to healing and connection that exists in the present and not in a haunted past, it becomes clear that the real burden of finding a way to the future lies with Nora and Darcy.
Nora must embrace who her son is now, even as she mourns her daughter which rather beautifully Homebodies embraces as a legitimate step forward in what is a daunting journey for any parent even if they ultimately arrive at a point of unconditional acceptance, while Darcy finally comes to understand that Dee is not someone to be shunned but an integral part of who he was and is and will always will be.
As queer journeys of acceptance and coming of age, Homebodies is an absolute original, a show which takes some emotionally fraught material and gives it an urgent, affecting intimacy, the kind that only comes when everyone involved is able to put aside previous ideas and hurts and expectations and tackle life as it actually is.
It’s not just the person at the centre of the transition who must make the adjustment, though clearly the weight of integrating past and present falls more heavily on Darcy’s shoulders than anyone else, but parents and family members too who aren’t always antagonistic to the news they received but need time to adjust to a wholly new reality.
That was certainly the case when I came out to my mother as a gay man, and it’s very true for Nora and Darcy too who, after Darcy leaves pre-transition for Sydney not to return until the events of Homebodies, had any ability to move from the shock of the new to the warmth and comfort of the accepted and lived-in cut abruptly short.
Is that why Dee manifests herself in the house?
Homebodies rather cleverly never quite spells that out, but in many ways it doesn’t have to, because her presence, whatever it is, is a powerful catalyst for healing and reconnection between Nora and Darcy and regardless of whether Dee is a ghost, a tangible memory or whatever she is, her light-flickering, glass-shattering manifestation in the house finally sets the wheels of conversation, love and acceptance into motion and Nora and Darcy are finally able to talk in a way that they always needed to but never quite ma managed.
As series about uniting a queer past and present go, and it is understandably a major theme in a lot of queer storytelling, Homebodies is a brilliantly moving, sweet, emotional ground-shaking series that places raw, unexamined humanity at its empathetic heart and dares to ask “where next?”
Homebodies is available on SBS on Demand.