[This article appears in the March/April 2024 print issue of Boston Spirit magazine. Subscribe for free today.]
Right now, the queer past is soaking up the spotlight. From buzzy Showtime series “Fellow Travelers”—the romantic political pulse-pounder set during the Lavender Scare of the 1950s—to FX’s recent “Pose,” set during the ’80s and ’90s in New York. Call it a much-welcomed response to historical erasure. And now, the book “Breaking the Rules: The Intimate Diary of Ross Terrill” is here to add another thrilling volume to queer history.
Edited by author Philip Gambone, the tome deep-dives into the life of historian and political scientist Ross Terrill from the 1960s to the 1980s and was released by Rattling Good Yarns Press in September 2023. Containing Terrill’s sprawling adventures is no small feat—from his youth in Australia, to receiving his PhD in political science from Harvard in 1970, to working with world leaders and news outlets as a leading expert on China, to testifying before Congress and more.
Now in his 80s, Terrill previously released the memoir “Australian Bush to Tiananmen Square” in 2020. But that work ignored a huge part of his life: Terrill is gay. And as he traveled the world and the highest echelons of political power, he indulged in all of life’s pleasures—from cuisine to an even more voracious appetite for sex.
Compiled from decades of diary entries, the book is an alluring peek at the most intimate parts of someone’s life: Frankly sexual, often moving, always fascinating.
“It’s an important piece of archival material that I hope not just the common reader, but scholars will find interesting because of its portrait of a certain time in gay history,” Gambone says. And it’s a portrait painted in lush colors. From a tryst with a waiter in Marrakesh in 1977, to cavorting at a gay bathhouse in San Diego in 1981, to longstanding love affairs in Boston that mix heat and heartache.
But besides the fun, just how important is such a frank portrayal of gay sex?
“It’s important simply because other books would remove it,” Gambone says. “For too many years gay stories were censored or simply erased from the picture. So here’s a chance to see how a gay man in the sixties and seventies and eighties—and especially during the height of the AIDS epidemic—worked out his life.”
Gambone, who recently released the memoir “As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II” about his journey retracing the wartime route of his father, has been friends with Terrill for about 30 years. In 1996, Gambone got a job teaching in Beijing for a semester, and before he left a friend introduced him to Terrill, thinking that the scholar could offer some pointers on gay life in China. Their friendship deepened once Gambone returned, and over the years Terrill hinted at his sexual exploits—which Gambone read about in detail once Terrill asked for help in publishing his journal. “It’s a fun book. It’s a sexy book,” Gambone says. But it’s a mistake to dismiss it as hedonism, because within lies deep heart—whether the entries describe affairs that last for hours or months. “I cried when I sensed a lack of warmth from him. I told him that three and a half years of knowing him had taught me, for the first time in my life, the meaning of loneliness,” Terrill writes of one of his relationships. And later, he brings back the laughter, “I found out tonight it’s very hard to cry and maintain a raging hardon at the same time.”
As for what Gambone hopes readers in the present will take away from this traipse through the past?
For all of our political progress, many queer people still have personal journeys ahead of them. “I certainly hope that the book is gonna be read by younger generations who have benefited from the kind of pathfinding that people like Ross made over the years in terms of putting together a life without shame.”
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