Based on the award-winning memoir by Timothy Conigrave, and adapted for the stage by acclaimed playwright Tommy Murphy, Holding the Man tells a remarkable true-life love story that speaks across generations, sexualities and cultures.

The course of teenage love rarely runs smooth, but it is a white-water adventure if you are secretly gay in an all-male school in 1970s Melbourne with a crush on the captain of the football team.

Against the odds, Tim and John develop a relationship that, for fifteen years, survives everything life throws at it – the separations, the discriminations, the temptations, the jealousies and the losses – until the only problem that love can’t solve turns up to part them.

‘Tommy Murphy is a bewitching playwright of startling originality’ – Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton, Artistic Directors of Sydney Theatre Company

'fresh, frank and funny… a wrenchingly moving love story I defy anyone with a pulse not to relate to' – Evening Standard

'Compelling, wrenching… unflinching, devastating, moving and funny’ – Sydney Morning Herald

Timmy Conigrave

Books