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"I actually started dancing not because I was particularly interested in dancing but because I really wanted to find out about my culture."Īfter graduating from NAISDA, Bray ended up living and working in Tel Aviv with his partner.įor ten years he lived as a gentile in Israel - and then the relationship ended, and he lost his partner, his home and his visa. So he dropped out of law school and enrolled in NAISDA (National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association) Dance College. "I'd always identified as Aboriginal, but never more than saying, 'Yeah, I'm Wiradjuri'." "I talk white, I look white, I have masses of white cultural capital," Bray explains. But it was through that activism that he realised how little he knew about his cultural background. The exorcist should have their licence revoked." A Wiradjuri man in Tel Avivīray got involved in Aboriginal activism on campus while he was studying law. ( Supplied: Pippa Samaya)Ĭompounding this fractured identity was Bray's realisation that he was gay - a reality that his mother and stepfather struggled to reconcile with their religious beliefs.īray says he once submitted to an exorcism. "My whole childhood was spent flicking between these two worlds, and I never quite felt that I fitted into either of them."īray started dancing in order to learn about his Wiradjuri culture.
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"I would drop from my very Christian, very white life into a very black life. "We lived a very white-picket-fence, lower-middle-class, out-in-the-country life, and then in summers or on long weekends I would go and stay with my Aboriginal father," he says.īray's father was a Wiradjuri man, an activist, and heavily involved in the land rights movement of the 1980s.īy contrast, his family in Orange were white Pentecostal Christians. 'From a very white life into a very black life'īray spent most of his childhood living with his white mother and stepfather in the New South Wales regional town of Orange.
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"I identify with this character because I feel a bit like a mutant creature," he tells ABC.īray's affinity with the platypus would lead him to develop an award-winning solo dance work performed not on stages, but in hotel rooms around Australia.įirst, though, he had to grapple with a life lived between worlds. It is not God punishing people for their sins.When British scientists first saw a platypus, some thought it must be a hoax when Charles Darwin first saw one, he took it as proof of his theory of evolution - unable to fathom why an omniscient "creator" would make a creature so similar to, yet distinct from, a water rat.Īnd, delving far deeper into history, there's an Aboriginal songline about the origin of the "biladurang" (its Wiradjuri name), which involves a fateful encounter between a curious duck and a wily water rat.įor dancer Joel Bray, this curious, confounding creature has become the perfect metaphor for his experience as a gay Aboriginal Australian man raised in a white Pentecostal Christian household. To which Blanche thoughtfully replies, "AIDS is not a bad person's disease, Rose. Rose's dialogue embodies several misconceptions about HIV infection, pervasive at the time: that "people like her" - an older, middle-class, heterosexual, "innocent" woman - shouldn't get such a disease, that none of her friends will want to associate with her now, and that she is being punished for some kind of bad behavior. As she waits for the results, worry and a deep-rooted panic take hold, and a pivotal scene takes place between the delightfully dimwitted Rose and saucy Southern belle Blanche. In "72 Hours," Rose receives a letter alerting her that she may have contracted HIV from a blood transfusion during gallbladder surgery six years earlier, and she is advised to get a test.
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The show known as much for its hilarious comedy as for fearlessly venturing into taboo TV territory was tackling its next sensitive topic: AIDS. This desperate question from a beloved character (Rose) on a beloved show ( The Golden Girls) is the defining moment in yet another landmark episode in the critically-acclaimed series. "Dammit, why is this happening to me? I mean, this shouldn't happen to people like me." In true kick-ass Golden Girls fashion, Dorothy (Bea Arthur, clockwise from left), Blanche (Rue McClanahan), Rose (Betty White) and Sophia (Estelle Getty) showed us how utterly human we all are at any age.