You Cant Ask That: June 8

This week’s episode of You Can’t Ask That “Gay Men” poses frank and intimate questions to 9 men including to Sydney’s infamous Barry Charles, aka “Troughman.”

Barry Charles, 71, grew up at a time when it was still illegal to be gay in Australia. A time when men were not only harassed over their sexuality, but beaten, stabbed, and brutally murdered. He marched in the first Mardi Gras and has spent much of his life fighting for gay rights since. Though he is best known for something a bit more risque.

“I’ve got to confess that I did get a buzz out of it, and I have kept all my press clippings,” explains Barry, better known as ‘Troughman,’ the folkloric figure who would famously lie down in urinals and let people piss on him, starting in the 1970s and continuing for four decades.

Liam Prince, the fresh-faced 23-year-old who is sitting next to Barry as he makes this revelation, nearly falls off
his chair. “Oh my God, I’ve heard of you,” he says, eyes wide with amazement. Such is the mystery and legend that shrouds Troughman, Liam wasn’t sure whether he existed at all. “I can’t believe you’re real!” he says.

Liam’s journey of sexual discovery couldn’t have been more different to Barry’s. Nearly 50 years his junior, Liam grew up in an outback NSW mining town at a time when homosexuality was no longer a crime and he was “never made to feel less than,” by his family for being gay.

“I don’t think I’ve gone out ever to look for just a sexual encounter. I’m not often around people who have done these type of things,” he says, adding, “I’m not overly sexual, I don’t party a lot, I’m a one-man man, I just can’t find that man.”

In meeting people from across the spectrum of gay men, we cut across lines of class, age, race, and sexual preference, examining what it means to be gay in 2022.

9:10pm Wednesday on ABC.