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Australian Story – Since Adam Was a Boy: Coming out to the family
Title:
Australian Story – Since Adam Was a Boy: Coming out to the family
Year
1997
This is a searingly honest moment in which Adam’s parents truthfully tell how they felt when Adam told them he was gay. They had anticipated the continuance of the family name and a mess of grandchildren. Nevertheless they stood by their son and their relationship has grown even stronger over the intervening years.
Summary by Janet Bell
The really fantastic thing brought out so well in this program is Adam’s courage, and that of his family, in revealing his sexual orientation so that others who live in the bush might learn that they don’t have to live a lie. It wasn’t easy and the director clearly and compassionately shows how difficult it was – and how for many years Adam lived with a terrible anger towards the world and himself until he felt able to tell the truth.
The great footage of Adam performing stunts on horseback with his family watching admiringly, nicely sets the mood for the comments we are about to hear.
Australian Story – Since Adam Was a Boy Synopsis
Adam Sutton is a quintessential cowboy. He’s fearless, fun-loving and gay. He’s a horse wrangler and rodeo rider but the biggest risk he ever took was to reveal the secret of his sexuality to the world.
This is Adam’s story from his earliest years – as a prankster kid with a close-knit family and adoring male and female friends, through a troubled period in his late teens when he was sent to jail for culpable driving causing the death of a young man.
Australian Story – Since Adam Was a Boy Curator's Notes
Coming out must always be a big decision but coming out in the bush must take a real act of courage. It took Adam Sutton many years to know and accept his sexual orientation – to himself, and to his family and friends. As a boy from the bush he’d never met gay people and was utterly unprepared for the turmoil he experienced over his sexuality.
This is Australian Story at its best. The series gives people space to tell their own stories. Adam’s story and that of his parents and sisters is truly riveting – the more so because they are ordinary people with an extraordinary story to tell.
Australian Story has no omniscient narrator, just the voice-over of the participants. At its best, it’s great television, when it’s less successful, the program can be rather sentimental but that’s not the case with Since Adam Was A Boy.
Notes by Janet Bell
Producers
Helen Grasswill, Ian Harley
Executive producer
Deborah Fleming
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.