The Marvel Star Who Survived Opus Dei as a Gay Teen

Before Australian actor, Tim Pocock, was cast as young Cyclops in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, he was a teenager growing up in a strict Catholic home - navigating a world where being gay wasn’t just discouraged, it was treated as something to be fixed.

In this raw and powerful conversation, Tim opens up about his time at Redfield College in Sydney - a school linked to Opus Dei. He speaks candidly about surviving conversion therapy, and the years he spent battling internalised homophobia.

Tim also shares what it was like to grow up silenced, how that trauma shaped his relationship with his body, his family and his faith, and what it took to finally unlearn it all - and live as himself.

This is a story of survival, truth, and reclaiming identity. 

You can follow Tim and find his book, The Truth Will Set You Free, here:

https://www.instagram.com/timjpocock/?hl=en

If this conversation brought up any hard feelings for you - please seek help. You can reach Lifeline on 13 11 14

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CREDITS:

Guest: Tim Pocock

Host: Kate Langbroek

Executive Producer: Naima Brown

Senior Producer: Bree Player

Audio Producer: Jacob Round

Mamamia acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land we have recorded this podcast on, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mama Maya acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Even though it's been my whole life praying the gay
away and wanting to be changed. There was something so
insidious about the tactics used in this occasion, and I
felt so insulted that everything that I was doing, and
everything that I'd achieved in life had boiled down to
essentially being coerced through trickery into a situation that I

(00:41):
had no say in. And I was twenty six.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Australian actor Tim Pocock was just twenty three when he
was cast as Young Cyclops in X Men Origins Wolverine
Landing in Hollywood, opposite Hugh Jackman. But behind the glats
and glamour of an international acting career was a young
man carrying a deeply buried secret. Adopted at birth, Tim

(01:15):
grew up in a devout Catholic family. He was enrolled
at Redfield College in Sydney, a school with links to
the secretive religious group Opus Day was here his education
was shaped by extreme doctrine, fear and a culture of silence.
In this conversation, Tim shares what it was like to

(01:37):
grow up gay in a world that didn't just reject him,
it actively tried to change him. Some of the experiences
Tim shares are very personal and intense, so please listen mindfully.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Friends.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
We talk about surviving his teenage years in an environment
where queerness was demonized, and how that shame seeped into
every part of his life, shaping his relationship with his body,
his faith, and his family. He speaks candidly about surviving
conversion therapy, wrestling with internalized homophobia, the complicated grief of

(02:16):
losing his mother, and the long, painful process of unlearning
everything he'd been taught, and how through it all he
found the courage to finally live as himself and still
keep faith. This is Tim Pocock. Hi, welcome to No Filter.

Speaker 4 (02:38):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Are you in prison because it's a very there's a
wall behind you that looks foreboding.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
Now I am no longer in prison. This is ironically
what freedom looks like.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
Oh, how clever.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
Because of course I have been reading your book, as
many will.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
The Truth Will Set.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
You Free, which has so many meanings for you that
you share with the reader because you are and many
people would know you as an actor.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
My kids know you as Cyclops.

Speaker 4 (03:13):
That's right, yep.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
People would know you from home in a way, or
as a singer with the Australian Opera when you're a child,
many people would know you.

Speaker 4 (03:23):
From your school, that's right, yep.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
And your school was a part of the Catholic Church.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
Are they a cult Opah Stay?

Speaker 4 (03:33):
That's an interesting one.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
So I refer to Opus Stay as like a sect
within the Catholic Church.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
Right.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
They're known for their secrecy, but they're also known even
within Catholic circles as being particularly conservative in their their views,
their methods, and their ideologies as well. But they do
like to keep things very sort of hush hush and quiet.
When people read the book, they'll obviously encounter a lot

(04:00):
of their interesting and unusual practices in how they approach
education and religion development, whether that be as a person
or spiritually as well, which for me at the time
was something that was just normal until I guess I
started getting success in the entertainment industry and meeting a

(04:21):
more broader spectrum of human and I started to realize
that my upbringing was maybe not quite as normal as
I thought it. Was, and so when people say words
like cult, I always sort of flirt with that, but
I never go so far as to say that. I
do find when I do explain certain things about that,

(04:42):
people will come to their own conclusions. And that is
a word that a lot of people will use to
describe them.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
Yes, because your mum, a seminal figure in your life,
was a devout Catholic, Yes, and so you'd always been
raised a Catholic, and you in fact lived in Ireland
for a time, which I consider to be a devoutly
Catholic country.

Speaker 4 (05:08):
Yep. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
When we lived there, it was a very small country
town as well, so very sort of it was sort
of its own old world, old school conservative bubble that
I was growing up in there. And it was when
we left Ireland and came back to Australia that I
then was introduced to the op stay world with the
school that I went to, which was its own sort

(05:32):
of conservative bubble that tried as best as it could
to keep the outside world away from us. So yeah,
sort of first eighteen years of my life were very
much unchecked by reality.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
Right, and the reality was constructed for you as it
is when you're a child by your parents. Tell me
a little bit about your mum and your dad.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
So my mum herself, as we said, very religious person,
grew up in the sort of boarding schools system where
the teachers were nuns or priests. It was in the
Southern Highlands. She was educated, so also a small country town.
She's one of nine. Their family, their values at the

(06:15):
time were very much against any of the progress or
changes that were happening in their own time.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
Obviously no birth control.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
Oh of course not no, like even natural family planning
is frowned upon. You know, if God wants me to
get pregnant, you'll be pregnant and that's will. So of
course anything beyond that is an absolute no no, which
is also why things like sex education just don't really
occur in that world, because they don't want people to
know about it.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
And so you were young, mean when you were living
in Ireland.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
So your family had gone from South Africa to Ireland,
to Australia then to Ireland.

Speaker 4 (06:54):
Yeah, yeah, I bounced around quite a bit as a kid.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah yeah. How old were you in Ireland?

Speaker 2 (07:01):
So was from about like four until just after I
turned seven, So two and a half three years that
we were there.

Speaker 4 (07:09):
I absolutely loved it there.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
It was such an idyllic, untouched, sort of romantic place
to live with, you know, all the farmland and gorgeous
views and just a really safe area as well, so
you could just be running around in this beautiful countryside
as a child and letting your imagination run wild. And
to encourage that, you know, you'd literally see centuries old

(07:31):
castle ruins in your friend's backyard because that's just the
place that it is.

Speaker 4 (07:36):
See it was.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
It was gorgeous, It was beautiful, and I really loved it,
and it was kind of kind of a shame to leave,
to be honest.

Speaker 3 (07:42):
But you had the pillar of family and the pillar
of the church even then, oh absolutely, And that was
when you had you had your first little awakening to
who you might be attracted to, even as a kid,
and kids have all sorts of crushes, but yours was so.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Catholic and it was like it was such an innocent attraction.
It was just I realized there was this boy that
served alta at my local Catholic parish in Crosshaven, which
was the name of the small town that we lived
in in Ireland, and I just you know, I liked
his face, and I liked the look of him, and
I just enjoyed like looking at him, and I kind
of realized, oh, that's that's how the women in the

(08:25):
movies that I watch look at men.

Speaker 4 (08:29):
I think.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
I think I'm not meant to be looking at him
like that. So it was already this thing that I
didn't understand but made me just feel like there was
some sort of barrier between me and maybe how I
was meant to be.

Speaker 3 (08:42):
Because your mom, in part of the kind of shunning
the worldly world, immersed you very much in a world
of old films and stuff.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
Yeah, we were watching My Fair Lady, Sound of Music,
King and I, Wizard of Oz, you know, all the
Burt Newton classics, who were watching all of those things,
when you know, other people were watching Teenage Mutant, Ninja,
Turtles and My Girl and the Simpsons. But my mum
was very strong about not wanting us to be involved

(09:14):
in anything that was modern because she saw modernism as
as bad as sort of the corruption of society. So
the more that we kind of clung onto the older
school ideals the better. So, you know, it did kind
of make things really difficult to be able to connect
with people because you know, they were watching Power Rangers

(09:35):
and they'd have all of the you know, figurines and
be playing with that, and I just I wouldn't I
wouldn't know what the game was or what they were
called or anything like that. And no one really wanted
to talk about Eliza Doolittle.

Speaker 3 (09:46):
So well, when you say way, you're talking about you
and your sister. Yes, yeap older or younger sister.

Speaker 4 (09:55):
So my sister's four years older than me.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
We're both actually adopted, but not from the same families,
so we're not biologically related, but we're always raised as siblings.
And you know, I think it's obviously a different experience
for everyone. But I think, you know, my sister being heterosexual,
and you know, she got engaged super young and married
super young, and became a mum super young. She married

(10:19):
her She went to Tangara School for Girls, which is
the female of the Oprah Stay schools.

Speaker 4 (10:25):
I went to Redfield College, which is the brother school.

Speaker 2 (10:29):
Her husband went to that school as well, And for
all intents and purposes, they end up sort of being
the poster child children for what that kind of community wants,
which is boys go to the boys school, girls go
to the girls school, they marry one another and then
their children go to the schools and it just kind

(10:49):
of keeps the bubble alive and unchecked.

Speaker 3 (10:53):
But these schools are not just any schools really because
they've played a significant part in politics because they have
a lot of heavy hitters have gone particularly through this
microcosm of the Catholic school education system. So Dominic Perrote,
who was the premier of New South Wales, he had

(11:13):
gone to your school.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yes, yeah, he was a two or three years above me,
I believe, and he's got a lot of siblings, so
they were at least one every sort of two years
peppered throughout the school, so I knew his siblings, and
you know, I had a cousin that dated his sister
for a while. So yeah, everyone knows everyone, especially back
in my day when the schools were a lot younger.

(11:37):
The class sizes were twenty to thirty students for an
entire grade a whole year, so there was really only
two to three hundred students in the whole school, and
most of them are from these large families. So it
really was this very tight knit, insular world where everyone
knows absolutely everyone and everybody's business and all of that. So, yeah,

(12:00):
Don Perrote, obviously being a few years older than me
doesn't mean that, you know, we had nothing to do
with each other. And then of course he became Premier
of New South Walese and he was seeking reelection, which
was when I first kind of spoke out, And it
wasn't anything to sort of directly aim at him, but
Louise Milligan was doing a documentary on Four Corners about

(12:21):
the op State schooling system and the funding, the government
funding that it gets for the education that it provides,
and just did a deep dive into sort of how
backward and archaic some of those educative principles are within
those schools.

Speaker 3 (12:38):
It's an interesting thing because sometimes coming from a small
school community can be a great thing, but when you
are the square peg in the round hole, it can
be a terrible thing.

Speaker 1 (12:56):
And it became a terrible thing for you.

Speaker 4 (13:00):
Yeah, it did.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
And I think, if anything, that's sort of one of
the messages that I want people to get from the
book is that there isn't anything inherently wrong with the
school or with the belief systems, or with the ideologies
that people have. But I think that there isn't enough
foresight to understand that a one size fits all approach

(13:22):
to education and to value structure when developing a young child,
it doesn't always work because people like me who are
gay are going to exist in that world and there
isn't any education or formation provided for people that are
different in that world.

Speaker 3 (13:41):
Well, in fact, it's the opposite. It's really not wanting
you to.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
Be gay, yes, one hundred percent, and they because belief
in that is rooted in their religious beliefs and therefore
their duty to God. It is a godlike thing that
they are doing to help someone who might be different
to no longer be different. So where they see something

(14:09):
as as an act of charity or mercy or helping
someone by helping them to stop be themselves actually ultimately
ends up being something that hurts mental health and is
only seen by the person experiencing it as manipulation.

Speaker 3 (14:26):
How old were you at this point, So you were
at high school?

Speaker 2 (14:30):
Then I started sort of midway through year too, so
just around about where I turned eight, and I was
there all the way until I graduated did the HSC,
so eight to eighteen.

Speaker 3 (14:42):
And at some point it became apparent to the rest
of your schoolmates and to teachers that you were gay.

Speaker 4 (14:54):
Yeah, it was a suspicion.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
It was a suspicion born of their definitions of masculine
and feminine. I somewhat accidentally became an opera singer when
I was ten years old.

Speaker 4 (15:10):
It was a boy soprano.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
Sang at the Sydney Opera House multiple times a night,
hundreds of times in my career, and it was something
that I loved to do. But singing like a girl
wasn't a masculine trait. The other boys were playing rugby
and cricket and doing manly much o things based on
sort of just that definition alone, and the fact that

(15:32):
I was a bit smaller, a bit slighter, not as strong,
not as tall as the other kids. I was the
easy target who was just already different, and so yeah
that even though they had no clue that I actually
was gay, and you.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
Barely at that point had a clue yourself, did you.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
I just knew that I liked looking at boys, That's
all that I knew. I didn't and I, to me,
it felt like a disease that maybe puberty would cure,
and maybe once I hit that moment and I had
a growth spurt, and maybe put on it, you know,
developed a little bit more in my body and that
kind of thing. Maybe that would just be something that
would go away. But it didn't. Prayer didn't help either.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
Stayed you tried to pray the gay away.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
I really did very much. So yeah, I wish I
didn't have it.

Speaker 3 (16:20):
Yes, because it didn't feel like a blessing. It felt
like a curse.

Speaker 4 (16:25):
Yeah, one hundred percent.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
And I just thought, how unfair is this because you know,
we're taught that sin will cast you into hell. So
you know, two etosexual people have sex before they get married,
they'll go to hell because they made that choice. And
I was like, but I didn't make the choice to
be gay. I was born this way. If I had
a choice about it, I would have preferred to have

(16:47):
been quote unquote normal because then I wouldn't have to
be carrying this huge ball and chain, you know, with
me everywhere that I go. So it just didn't feel
particularly fair that I was born doomed for hell.

Speaker 3 (17:01):
And at that age, all you want to do is
be normal.

Speaker 2 (17:06):
Absolutely, Yeah, apart from you know, not wanting to be
picked on, not wanting to be bullied or bashed or
any of that.

Speaker 4 (17:14):
Sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (17:16):
I also, I was genuinely worried about hell because it
was something that we were just taught about and told
about every single day, you know, instead of bedtime stories.
My mum would read from books about saints, and some
of those saints had supposedly had visions of hell. Then
she would read chapters about what this particular saint had

(17:38):
said about when she had a vision of hell, and
how she was shoved into a hole in the wall
that was you know, a billion degrees hot that was
constantly pressing down on her and she couldn't breathe and
was just constantly being you know, squashed in this and
that's what her eternity was going to be like if
she went to Hell. Then I'm being read those stories
as a ten, eleven, twelve year old, also knowing that

(18:02):
I am actually gay, which is a sin which is
going to take me to Hell. So that's what I
have to look forward to. Not a pleasant experience.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
No night, darling, sleep well.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
Yeah, literally, it's like all right, well, good night, now
here's the light switched off, and then you're just left
there lying in bed kind of just worrying and anxious
and you wish you could sort of speak to them
and say this is what I'm thinking and feeling. But
of course you can't do that because you know what
they think about that. You know, even as a young
child that your parents won't be able to have an

(18:36):
unbiased conversation with you. It will only be a judgment
based one. And you hear stories about these other kids like, oh,
did you hear about so and so it turns out
he's gay. Well he's gone off to this place where
they're going to fix him now, And I just thought,
I don't want that for me, so I'll just keep
it to myself.

Speaker 4 (18:52):
So you live a very internal life.

Speaker 3 (18:54):
And then, but what did your mother make of you?
Mothers kind of see everything. Of course, there was a
big part of your mother though she was very close
and supportive of you in your theatrical endeavors that obviously
the gay thing was a real no go zone. But

(19:15):
what did she see in you at that point?

Speaker 4 (19:19):
So I think she definitely knew.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
She would never talk about it outright, but I could
always sense that when I was doing musical theater or opera,
I could tell that she was concerned about how free
I was in that environment, because being free in an
operatic setting can lend itself to a little bit of
additional flamboyance. So if I was in a rehearsal period

(19:44):
and I was around other kids who were similar to
me and feeling a bit freer and lucier myself, she
might notice that, you know, my wrist is a little limp,
and so then she would kind of slap it and say, oh,
you look like a sissy boy. So she'd always sort
of just try and like course correct, you know, don't
swear your hips so much. You know, maybe try and
lower your voice when you're talking, or just things like that.

(20:05):
She would, you know, it just was always like a
constant thing that she would be worried and concerned about.

Speaker 4 (20:12):
You know.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
She would tell me that I could afford to butcher
up a little bit and would encourage me to play
sports and tell me to have more interests in what
the other kids at school had so that i'd be
able to connect with them a bit more and you know,
be a bit more manly.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (20:27):
And so yeah, I could tell that it was always
something that she was concerned about. And then as I
sort of got older, and you know, I wasn't dating women,
and you know, bringing girls home for dinner and.

Speaker 4 (20:37):
Stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
Yeah, you could just like always could tell that it
was there, but it was sort of such a shameful
thing that you don't bring it up.

Speaker 4 (20:46):
So it was just like this elephant in the room.

Speaker 3 (20:48):
Was it also because you loved your mom and you
didn't want to disappoint your mom aside from the fact
that there was always a threat of eternal damnation, the
thought of disappointing your mum who had such high hopes
and dreams for you and had chosen you as her

(21:09):
adult the son, her beloved adopted son.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
Absolutely, yeah, I felt like I wanted to be the
picture perfect child for her because I yeah, you're right,
I didn't want to disappoint her. I wanted to make
her happy. I knew the shame that she would feel.
I felt that shame myself every single day, and being
an empathetic person, I think when you go through a persecution,

(21:32):
you do naturally become more of an empathetic person. I
didn't want her to feel the way that I felt
all the time, so I would have preferred to have
kept her shielded from any knowledge or anything like that.
And for that reason, you know, I say in the book.
You know, if my mom she did pass in twenty twelve,
had she not passed away, I'm not sure if I

(21:56):
ever would have come out.

Speaker 3 (22:03):
After this short break. Tim recalls the extreme bullying he
endured at read Field College. What happened to you at
school really was persecution.

Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yeah, it was just NonStop for ten years. You know,
it started out innocently enough. You know, I have a
bit of an unfortunate surname, soys boys would find ways.

Speaker 3 (22:33):
What sort of fun would schoolboys make with pocock?

Speaker 2 (22:36):
I can't imagine anything you can imagine has been said.

Speaker 4 (22:42):
So yeah, there was a lot of that.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
And then when the opera stuff started to come along
into the picture, then it was you know, you seeing
like a girl. You're a girl, You're a gay, You're
a fag, you're a poof homo, all of that. And
because I, you know, wasn't the sporty kype, I wasn't
in particular shape. I didn't really know how to carry myself,
it was an easy target situation. So as the boys

(23:06):
got older and got stronger, and as their vocabulary increased,
as their muscles increased, the verbal and the physical abuse
did become more and more extreme as the as the
time would go by.

Speaker 3 (23:19):
And also I imagine at the time when they were
having their own sexual awakenings, the norm being that they
were all straight, that you became even more of a
target to them.

Speaker 4 (23:32):
Yeah. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
And I think because I wasn't sharing in the kind
of the boy talk, the locker room talk that they
were having, or if I did, it would always seem
so put on, if that makes sense. Yeah, And it
just again like I just wasn't interested in it, and
you know I was. I was a bit of a
late bloomer too, which I was okay with because I
loved singing opera and it was it was my escape

(23:56):
from the day to day reality of what I was
going through at school.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
Which was so brutal.

Speaker 3 (24:02):
You actually say in the book it was like I
was living a shadow life during the day that was
during the brutality at school, and was being brought to
life at night when you'd be going off to do
your performances.

Speaker 4 (24:17):
Yeah. It did.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
I felt I felt like I was living two lives
at once, you know, almost like you know the superheroes
of old in the comics. You know, by day, I
was just at school and really not enjoying myself at
all and feeling really miserable and like I wanted to
hide and just vanish into a corner and be left alone.

(24:39):
But then at nighttime, I'm on stage in front of
thousands of people performing, singing, dancing, getting standing ovations, and
then I'd go home, and then the next day it'd
be sort of like rinse, repeat, Yeah, it just didn't
It just didn't feel real, and especially because what I
was enjoying about life was the thing that was actually

(25:02):
making me the target during the daytime. So then I
was sort of resenting this thing that was actually giving
me a purpose to live.

Speaker 3 (25:11):
And your parents at that point knew that you were
very much drawn to an artistic life. How did they
and how did the school respond to that?

Speaker 2 (25:23):
So I don't think my parents really ever intended that
I would get to a professional level, especially at you know,
such a young age, because I guess that is a
bit out of the ordinary. I think they just thought,
like music, learning music can be an interesting discipline for
a child to have. But then I just did excel
at it, and through accidental sort of you know, chance encounters,

(25:45):
ended up you know, as an opera singer. But I
think there was a there was a bit of bragging rights.
You know, they get to go to opening nights at
the Sydney Opera House and get free tickets and tell
their friends like, oh, you know, my son is you know,
singing Mozart tonight. But also I think it seemed fairly
innocent because I was a child, so it was just
going to be condensed to that period. But what I

(26:09):
I started to learn was that this was actually a
calling for life for me. I enjoyed it so much.
I just wanted to continue to do it for the
rest of my life. And when they started to realize that,
that was when it was like no, no, no, no, no,
this is just supposed to have been while you were
a kid. So when my voice did eventually change and

(26:31):
I was no longer able to sing as a boy
soprano and therefore stopped singing opera, I had wanted to
transition into a performing arts school so that I could
continue to develop those passions. But the answer was no,
because in my mum's words, the most important thing was
my religious education.

Speaker 3 (26:51):
Reading that in the book that was like your bid
for freedom.

Speaker 4 (26:56):
Yeah, it really was.

Speaker 3 (26:57):
We all wanted you to have to escape not only
the intense bullying that had become physical by this point
as well from the school kids, but also from teachers.

Speaker 2 (27:10):
Yeah, so the thing about the teaching staff is that
the way that the structure worked in the schools with
it being part of OPA Stay was that a lot,
not all, but a lot of the teachers were members
of OPA Stay, which means that they're either numeries or supernumries.
Numeries are unmarried men and women who dedicate their life

(27:35):
to OPA Stay. They're not priests or nuns, but they
take a vow of celibacy for the rest of their life.
Men and women are separate. So at the girls' school
it was all female teaching staff. At the boys' school
it was like ninety nine percent male teaching staff, with
a lot of those teachers either being celibate male numeries
or on the occasion supernumers, which are married members of

(27:58):
OPA Stay.

Speaker 1 (27:59):
Right, but they still have those vowels to still.

Speaker 2 (28:02):
Have the vows, they still live by the ideologies of
OPA Stay. And then of course they also had study
sets that were operated by well supposedly independently, but they
were part of the school, and that's where a lot
of the celibate numery teachers lived, and we would be
encouraged as students after school to hop on a bus

(28:25):
and go and spend time with them at these study
centers where they had a study room, you'd do your homework,
they had a little chapel, you'd have some religious meditation,
and then they would have activities, you know, whether it
be sports, ab sailing, going to the movies, whatever it
may be. And then during school holidays they would do camps.
You'd go skiing, or you'd gone bushwalks and hikes for

(28:47):
a few days, that kind of thing.

Speaker 4 (28:49):
So it sort of was like this.

Speaker 2 (28:54):
Bubble that you're just constantly surrounded in that sort of
goes unchecked. And when it came to some of the
numery teachers, you started to discover that these were men
who took their vow of celibacy when they themselves had
not actually experienced the world at large.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
So when they were teenagers sometimes.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
Exactly, you know, there there were some kids that had
taken their vow of celibacy and become overstain humeries from
migrade at school that had done that before we'd even graduated.
So there was still a teenage boy when they've taken
this vow to commit their lives to celibacy and open
stay before even graduating high school.

Speaker 4 (29:35):
So arrested development exactly right.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
And then those people become teachers and they're sort of
stuck in this teenage, like you said, arrested development stage
where their maturity has never really been tested. They've never
had to really get out of it, so they're sort
of sixteen seventeen, eighteen year old students are kind of
at the same level as them, and so they're kind
of interested in sort of having more of a friendship
bond with them than sort of a disciplinary and educative

(30:01):
sort of bond with them.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
And they're also reporting back, are they not.

Speaker 2 (30:07):
Yeah, so it's like it's sort of there's eyes everywhere
because you're also as a student in these schools. Part
of their I guess unique selling point is they have
what they now call their mentoring system, where each student
is assigned a teacher at the school who will dedicate
particular time to that student every month to aid them

(30:29):
in their personal development, which is through the lens of
you know, the OPA stay ideologies. More often than not,
these mentors are OPA stay numeries or supernumeries, and so
basically you'd be saying in the middle of English class
and I would come on the door and it'd be
your mentor and it was time to take you out
of class, and you'd spend fifteen twenty minutes just walking

(30:50):
the school grounds one on one with this teacher and
they would ask you, you know, how your spirituality is going,
and you know what issues you might be having, and
you know, I would talk about the fact that I
was not enjoying myself and that I was, you know,
being a bit of a target and that kind of thing,
and they would say, we'll stop making yourself such a target.
Maybe you have more interests in what those other boys

(31:10):
have interests in, you know, maybe maybe try to butch
up a little bit. And then they would have meetings
with your parents where everything that you've spoken about with
them and your mentoring sessions get passed on to the parents,
and the parents talk to them about what you've been
saying to them at home. So you're just constantly surrounded
by all of these eyes, all of whom are sort
of working together to mold you into the way that

(31:35):
they see is how you should then graduate and go
out into the world, which, as we were saying before,
if you are different like myself and they're thinking they're
trying to change, is unchangeable. Though they might see it
as being this is good for your development, for people
like me, it's nothing more than manipulation.

Speaker 3 (31:55):
What was going on with you mentally then at the time,
so you obviously had to You weren't saying when they'd
say how are you going? You weren't saying, oh, I
think I've got feelings for guys. You obviously were not
saying that you had constructed an altery go for yourself.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
Yeah, I would sort of. I didn't exactly sort of
pretend to be butcher or anything. I would just sort
of say, well, they're just making assumptions because they don't
think what I do is particularly masculine. But that doesn't
actually mean that I am gay. But it also doesn't
mean that I whether I am or not, it doesn't
mean that I should be picked on this way. But
I just thought, you know, maybe I'm just a different person,

(32:36):
you know, in the same way that the computer nerds
are computer nerds and they're not good at rugby. I'm
a musical nerd. I'm just good at the music, stuff,
and eventually, you know, they'll all see and it'll all
be totally fine. So I never once spoke about it.
I never once admitted to it. But then mentally I
did know that I was gay, and I thought, well,

(32:56):
if this is the behavior that I'm receiving based on
nothing but a suspicion, how much worse will it be
if I confirm it for them? And then, of course
you run the risk of losing your family because people
get ostracized, and I didn't want that either, you know,
as an adopted kid, you know, I had some abandonment issues.
I needed my family to stick around and still want

(33:17):
me and stuff.

Speaker 4 (33:18):
So yeah, it was.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
It was very confusing, and it was very difficult, and
I would just spend all of my time in very
deep prayer, praying that it would be taken away from me.
I would even pray, like I sincerely believed that if
I asked strong enough, I could be a different person.
I might wake up in someone else's consciousness and I
would look in the mirror and it wouldn't be my

(33:40):
face staring back at me. It would be you know,
the popular, good looking rugby boy in the grade above me,
who everybody loves, and he gets to walk down the
corridors at school, never once having to look over his shoulder.
Who's never had, you know, a negative word spoken about him.
I just even if God gave me that for one day,
I just wanted to experience it just once.

Speaker 4 (34:03):
And it never happened.

Speaker 1 (34:04):
No, it never ever happened. But I also never happened.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
I also discovered in doing that, though, in having such
a deep prayer life that had to be deep, it
had to be challenged more than say, the popular heterosexual
kids ever had to pray, you know, they'd never had
to pray that deeply or that existentially. I discovered something
about myself in doing all of that, which was that

(34:29):
I was so sad to think that if I had
woken up with someone else, all of the things that
I was really proud of, like the fact that I
was good at music, I knew I was a sensitive,
kind person. There was a lot about myself that I
realized I did like, and I thought, wouldn't it be
a shame if I did wake up with someone else,

(34:49):
if all of the rest of it just didn't exist.
I wanted to still have those things, so.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
That kernel in you, the kernel of your essential self
was still sprouting within you that had not been crushed.

Speaker 4 (35:04):
It had not been crushed.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
It always stood, it always sat there, and I think
it always was like I will be a day if
you buid your time where it will get to flourish.
You just have to be patient and you just have
to sit it out. And I don't really know, because
I don't think I was really the strongest person, so
I'm not really sure how that was what got me through,

(35:26):
And I'm not sure if for a lot of other
people who have gone through similar things, I'm not sure
where they find their strength. I think for me, specifically,
the knowledge that I was adopted and always having that
feeling that I was always just a little bit of
the outsider gave me just enough of an understanding that
I was probably never going to ever be fully understood

(35:49):
because I'm not my parents' biological child, and I think
that was just all I needed to kind of go.
You just need to get through school, then you get
to call the shots, and when you do that, it
will be your own life. And that's sort of what
I did.

Speaker 3 (36:02):
So even though you were trying to protect that deep
essential sacred in you, your.

Speaker 1 (36:09):
Mum found some gay pornography.

Speaker 4 (36:12):
She did, now right, it was a fun day.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
What happened?

Speaker 2 (36:17):
She liked to snoop through my room and one day
I'd gotten home from work and she had found a
magazine and a DVD. That one day, I'd been in
the CBD and I think I walked past a past
an adult bookstore. Our computers at home had all these
net nannies and blocks on the computer, so you couldn't

(36:38):
like even if. I remember one time it was the
Melbourne Cup and I was researching gay Waterhouse to see
what courses she had running, but net nanny popped up
because gay was part of the search, so I couldn't
even do that. And I thought, well, my parents have
never actually spoken to me about whether or not I am,

(37:01):
so why have they put a block on gay? They
obviously know, they just don't want to talk to me
about it. So, you know, I never really had any
exposure to anything. And you know, there was a show
called Queer as Folk on TV, but I actually found
that a bit too much because it was I was
such a conservative kid in this you know, really sheltered
bubble looking at that stuff. It was too confronting for

(37:23):
me to kind of you know, take on board and
so yeah. I was in the city one day and
I passed part walked past an adult bookstore and just
kind of ducked in with the sunglasses on and my
hat pulled down over my head, and I picked up
a magazine and a DVD and I just bought them
and then they just stayed stashed in my bottom drawer
at home. And one day my mum had found it,
and I came home from work and she had torn

(37:46):
every page out of the magazine individually and had laid
them all across the dining room table like a tablecloth.
I walked into that and my dad was sitting at
the standing at the kitchen counter, not saying anything, just
looking down, and my mum was just staying there. She
was just furious, and she just kept saying, like, is

(38:07):
this who you are?

Speaker 4 (38:08):
Is this what you have come?

Speaker 2 (38:11):
And I sort of I couldn't really, it was just
too overwhelming to really think.

Speaker 4 (38:15):
But I couldn't.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
I couldn't answer her, honestly, but in my head I
was thinking, what do you mean what I've become? This
is this is who I've always been being attracted to
men is what I've always been this is Nothing has
happened in my life that caused this. There's never been,
you know, like a downward spiral that took me here.
I just bought this because it's the only way that

(38:38):
I've been able to sort of satisfy any kind of
curiosity or get any sort of even as unfortunate as
it is, education about sex and sexuality.

Speaker 4 (38:49):
And you know, I just sort of passed it off, like, oh,
it's just a phase.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
You know. I got teased so much at school for
being gay that I thought maybe I'll buy it and
just see if it's something that I like. And she
was like and and I said, well, no, no, no,
I didn't like it. That's why it's in the bottom
of the drawer because you know, I never even looked
at it. I just bought it and regretted it and like,
don't worry it, so then you can be sure that
sort of within a month, I started dating a girl

(39:13):
because I thought, well, that'll that'll help.

Speaker 1 (39:16):
Who was that lucky girl? Who was that lucky girl?

Speaker 2 (39:20):
She was a coworker at the cinema complex that I
worked at, and we did get along really well, and
she was beautiful and she was funny and We were
together about nine months. She was a little bit younger
than me. I was like twenty one and she was
like eighteen or nineteen. She hadn't had a boyfriend before,
so she didn't really have any expectations. So we'd go
on dates and I would never kiss her because I

(39:42):
was never compelled to, and she seemed quite fine with that.
So it was sort of this really great situation. But
as it went on, and I think people don't really
think about this because we you know, we use the
term beards. You know, gay guy has a beard, and
that's a female friend that makes it look like he's straight.

Speaker 3 (39:59):
Especially in Hollywood where you ended up, especially in Holly.

Speaker 4 (40:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:03):
Yeah, And as much as it's it's sad to think
that people need that in order to to survive or
what have you, at the end of the day, what
started to really come home to me was that it
was really quite a misogynistic thing. Here I was using
this girl for my own selfish needs.

Speaker 4 (40:25):
That's not really right.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
You know, I'm lying to her, and essentially, you know,
had I not ever come out my family, I think
they always knew and they never once questioned me when
I was dating this girl, like oh, are you wasting
her time?

Speaker 4 (40:38):
Is this right?

Speaker 2 (40:39):
And they honestly would have been happier in life knowing
full well that I was gay if I married a
woman under false pretenses, just as long as I was
sort of maintaining the outward appearance of heterosexuality.

Speaker 1 (40:58):
That's not all of my conversation with Tim.

Speaker 3 (41:00):
Coming up after the break, we talk about how Hollywood
became the path to his freedom from the church. So
at this point, you've left school, you do the most
extraordinary thing, which is I often think that if it
doesn't break you, the oppression that you've endured will make you.

(41:24):
And you've got such tenacity in you. And I think
also the way you were raised taught you to think
differently to other people. So you decide that you want
an audition for one of the X Men films that
you've heard is going to be filming in Sydney. And

(41:47):
at this point you don't have an agent, you don't
have a manager, you're not an actor per se.

Speaker 1 (41:54):
If you're recognized by the roles that you've.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
Had, Yeah, I'd just done a whole bunch of acting courses.
After doing opera, I realized opera is a very melodramatic
form of entertainment, and you can develop some bad habits.

Speaker 4 (42:08):
You can be a bit too broad and big.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
But I developed a love for film and TV and
that's a lot more subtle when a camera is sort
of right here in your face. So I wanted to
get rid of the bad habits and you know, learn
more of the craft. So done a whole bunch of
courses and classes and spent thousands of dollars having someone
produce a show real for me, and thousands of dollars
on headshots. And you go around Sydney and you hand
out your headshot and your DVD to all of the

(42:33):
agents and they all just say, look, there's no work
in Australia, so we're not taking anyone on right now
possibility at an agent. You know, I spent my time
paying attention to what was happening in the industry, and
so when things came up that I felt, well, it's
not my fault that I'm not getting an audition for this.
I found my own way, and that was that I
found information online of who the casting directors were and

(42:56):
what their contacts were, and I just started peppering them
with my head shot and my show reel and then
I would call them facetiously two three times a week
and say, hey, this.

Speaker 4 (43:06):
Is Tim Pocock.

Speaker 2 (43:07):
I sent you a package in the mail yesterday and
the day before and the day before that and the
day before.

Speaker 4 (43:11):
That, just wanted to make sure you got it.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
And eventually, after several weeks of this particular casting, gregt
That called me up and said, fine, just come on in,
we'll meet you, see what you're all about. And so
I went and did that, and based off of that,
they offered me an audition and then just had a
whole bunch of auditions with them after that, which eventually
led to being cast as a superhero in the X

(43:33):
Men franchise. So yeah, I don't know, like I think
sometimes that tenacity can be a bit annoying. I'm not
sure if it'd be appropriate for me to encourage people
to follow in my footsteps in that way. But I
kind of just had to never say die attitude and
just that colonel we were talking about before, it was
still inside me saying this is the career you're meant

(43:56):
to do, and so I just wasn't going to take
no for an answer, and it ended up working out.

Speaker 3 (44:01):
And also that beautiful face, your beautiful face that you
had prayed would be replaced by someone else's face.

Speaker 1 (44:09):
Stood you in such good steed.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
Yeah, I guess I was lucky that I looked a
bit like James Marsden, who played the role in the
previous three films, which is obviously a great compliment to
me because I grew up. You know, the first X
Men film came out when I was fifteen, so I
was target market for All the kids at school were
watching it and they loved the action, and I was
sitting at home saying like, Oh, that's Cyclops. He's a
bit handsome, isn't he. I want to maybe one day up,

(44:35):
one day grow up and be that guy. And then
all of a sudden, one day I realized I'd grown
up and I was that guy.

Speaker 4 (44:40):
And also I was now a superhero.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
So it was kind of like, take that everyone at
school that picked on me, who's king of the castle?

Speaker 4 (44:46):
Now?

Speaker 3 (44:48):
But your mom, at the same time had gotten ill.
That was around that time.

Speaker 2 (44:57):
It was Yeah, she'd found out whilst I was filming
X Men that she had stage four ovarian cancer. She
waited until after I had finished initial photography because she
knew I was on such a high with it, she
didn't want to kind of ruin it. But yeah, about
a week after I finished filming, she sort of pulled
me aside and told me that she had a tumor

(45:18):
in her ovaries and had to have a hysterectomy and
she'd then be starting chemo and stuff. So I came
crashing down to earth very quickly after having that sort
of career success, and then sort of the next few
years as I continued to act, you know, that's when
I started doing Dance Academy as well. But she was
just in and out of cancer treatments, and yeah, it

(45:40):
was just it was a weird kind of time, but
in a similar sense, almost like what happened at school,
where I was miserable by day, but then performing at night,
I felt again like I had a bit of this
jewel life, because you know, when I was at home
and around family, I was obviously still very much in
the closet, but very all consumed with just the terror

(46:02):
and heartbreak of watching my mom struggle and losing her
battle with cancer.

Speaker 3 (46:09):
And you also found out, did you not, that your father,
this holy man, had been having an affair, Yeah, with
your mom's cousin.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
It was your godmother, Yeah, my godmother. So it's very
bold and the beautiful, very soap opera kind of stuff,
But yeah, I did.

Speaker 4 (46:29):
I found that out very accidentally.

Speaker 2 (46:32):
My father and my godmother they didn't know that I
had found out, and I didn't tell Mom. I made
the choice not to tell her. She was still battling
the cancer and I thought her body is literally breaking
right now. I'm not going to be the one that
breaks her heart too.

Speaker 4 (46:48):
So I told my sister.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
I said, we just have to keep this a secret,
and we just have to be there for Mum, because
this explains why Dad's been a bit distant throughout this process.
We just need to be there for her and keep
this secret. And we decided that we would only tell
Mom if she went into remission and it stuck.

Speaker 4 (47:08):
If she stayed in.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
Remission and she had recovered, then we would say, by
the way, this is what's going on. But it just
it angered me because I obviously carried so much guilt
about who I was as a person because of what
I was dealing with, and just the hypocrisy of knowing
that someone who was part of two people who were
part of that holier than thou, judgmental community that had

(47:33):
inadvertently contributed to the way that I was feeling about myself,
were going off and doing something that was to me
actually wrong, because not only was it against the vows
or against you know, your relationship with your cousin, but
it's also hurtful to someone else. You know, whether I
marry a man.

Speaker 3 (47:52):
And it's a choice, and it's a choice, it's yours
is not a choice.

Speaker 4 (47:57):
Mine wasn't a choice, and theirs was.

Speaker 2 (47:59):
You know, they have rules too for introceptual people, but
they have an option, which is you wait until you
get married before you have sex or what have you.
This was have your cake and eat it too, because
they had all the heterosexual options at their doorstep and
still chose to do something that was selfish and that
was hurtful to other people.

Speaker 3 (48:21):
When you realize that your mother's health had declined again
and that was a losing battle, and at that point,
I imagine you'd do anything for your mum. She suggested
that you see a therapist.

Speaker 1 (48:37):
Yep, how did that go?

Speaker 2 (48:40):
It was an interesting experience. There was a lot going on.
She was obviously sick, she'd been given a death sentence.
At that point, I'd learned about my father's affair. I
was just finishing up on the second season of Dance Academy.
My character was being written out of the show, so
that sort of time in my life was coming to
an end as well. I wasn't sleeping at night because

(49:00):
I was just constantly up hearing mum vomiting every single
night at all hours because of how sick she was.
It was a very stressful time. And during all of that,
I found my mom sleeping in my bedroom again, obviously
trying to look for more evidence of what she'd found
that one time before, and she was up to.

Speaker 1 (49:19):
A mother's strength, a mother's.

Speaker 2 (49:21):
Strength exactly, and I think she felt caught out and whatnot.
We ended up having an argument and I ended up
swearing at her, which was an absolute no no in
our house. And it was very obvious that everything that
was going on, I was spiraling mentally with all of
the pressure of it. And so the following morning she
approached me and said that she thought would be a

(49:41):
good idea if I saw a therapist, and I thought, fantastic,
This is actually a great opportunity for me because I
don't get to talk to anyone about being gay and
how that makes me feel. I haven't been able to
talk to anyone about how my dad's a fair makes
me feel, because that's a secret that I have to
keep as well. And of course there's the career issues
and everything, but also the fact that the only guarantee

(50:02):
I had in my future was my mother's funeral. So
I saw this as a fantastic opportunity to really finally
get to talk about things that were keeping me up
at night. Of course, she then says to me that
she's already made the appointment and it's in about an hour,
so let's hop in the car and go now. And
when I arrived there, I noticed that there was a

(50:22):
plaque next to the therapist's office door that said Catholic psychologist,
and I thought, well, that's strange. I didn't realize psychologists
had religious denominations. I get in there and I see
a lot of religious iconography in their Mum had a
little session with him beforehand. When I get in there,
he tells me that he's part of Opus Stay and

(50:44):
then tells me that he specializes in hypnotherapy for addictions
to cigarettes, alcohol, or I don't know, homosexuality, and then
he kept bringing up all these occurrences of his successful
hypnotisms that have cured people of same sex attractions, and
I thought, well, why are we harping on about this.
I haven't told you that yet, and I'm sure as

(51:05):
hell not going to tell you now because I know
that you're part of Opu's day. So this isn't what
I thought it was going to be. But then he
just kept insistingly.

Speaker 1 (51:13):
So who had told him?

Speaker 2 (51:16):
So, you know, rather than saying anything to me, she'd
sort of gone in and said, this is what I
need from you, because he was just very insistent, like,
let's put you under hypnosis.

Speaker 4 (51:25):
Let's put you under hypnosis.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
In the book, I describe it as psychological rape, because
someone is essentially taking you out of your own mind
where you're not in control of yourself, sort of like
a roofie, so that they can then penetrate your mind
against your wishes and you become a puppet on their string.
And even though it's been my whole life praying the

(51:50):
gay away and wanting to be changed, there was something
so insidious about the tactics used in this occasion, and
I felt so insulted. That, you know, everything that I
was doing and everything that I'd achieved in life had
boiled down to essentially being coerced through trickery in were
a situation that I had no say in, and I

(52:12):
was twenty six, But it felt like an act of
love for my mum to at least pretend that I
was going along with it. Her months, her days were numbered,
and I just thought, I'll just play the part. She'll
feel at ease and relaxed, thinking that she's done the
right thing and that I'm going to be set on

(52:32):
the right path, and I'll just pretend. So I just
just pretended to the therapist that I was going along
with the hypnotism, and literally I was writing shopping lists
in my head or thinking about what my workout at
the gym was going to be afterwards, and just pretending
to be going through hypnosis. And then thank you so much.
Oh that was fantastic. I feel so much better. Oh
look at her, she's gorgeous. Oh it's working already.

Speaker 1 (52:55):
So how extraordinary though that?

Speaker 2 (52:58):
Yeah, but that was the tipping point for me. That
was the tipping point of I'm going to stand up
for myself now.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
So yeah, because even with had her lowest EBB, her
physical eb she still couldn't accept that about you. That
was the one thing that she wanted to change. So
at some point that must also compound for you. How

(53:26):
unacceptable it.

Speaker 2 (53:27):
Was, absolutely and it is a real shame because it
was only just months before she passed away that this happened.
It's such a shame that she passed away with me
knowing that that's what she was thinking of me. And
you know, people will say, you know, when it's sort
of the anniversary my mum's passing, or say her birthday
or something, people, you know, they'll say like, oh, your
mum would be so proud of you, And I just think, well,

(53:50):
I actually will never get closure on that. And she
died with me thinking that she would never be proud
of me if I was my authentic self. So thanks
for saying that, but I can't agree with you, and
that's not a pleasant way to be. But I just
I have to hope that now that she is gone,
and you know, if the afterlife that I was always

(54:13):
told exists, if it does exist, so I believe she's
in the good place and she's seeing everything now and
understanding things better. I think if she could speak to
me now, I think she would tell me that she's
okay with who I am.

Speaker 3 (54:26):
It might be hard for people to imagine who haven't
grown up in a religious background that what might seem
oppressive was also so deeply loving towards you.

Speaker 2 (54:37):
Yeah, and that's I think something that I haven't ever
really seen being discussed in the you know, the conversation
about sort of conservative values versus you know, LGBTQI plus
human rights is you know, people just say, oh, you know,
the church or the mom. You know, they're the bad guy,
they're the evil ones. But it's so much more nuanced

(54:59):
than that, because love is involved. And I can't fault
my mum for her intentions. Her beliefs were very extreme,
but to her, what she was trying to do was
to save my eternal soul. You know, this was bigger
than life and death. This was heaven and hell, and
she was doing everything from a very loving place to

(55:22):
ensure in her mind ultimate best for me.

Speaker 4 (55:24):
And I can't faulter for that.

Speaker 2 (55:26):
I just wish that she had had a more rounded,
sort of critical thinking approach to existence herself. And I
wish that that sort of bubble and people in that
mindset would be a bit more open to really trying
to empathetically understand and connect with people who maybe have

(55:47):
a different sexual preference than they might understand, rather than
choosing to stay in willful ignorance because they don't want
to have those conversations.

Speaker 1 (55:57):
But that's not.

Speaker 3 (55:57):
Even just a generational thing? Is that because your sister
you also ended up as strange from and you'd been
so close.

Speaker 4 (56:05):
Yeah, my sister and I are very close.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
Like I love my sister and my nieces and neptus,
you know, and especially when you know, with Mum getting sick,
you know, I very much we relied on each other
to kind of get through how difficult that was, and
with the stuff with Dad as well, And so I
just always thought that we had a really close bond
because we were also bonded by the fact that we
were adopted too, you know, only only us two sort

(56:29):
of you know, would really know what that was like,
being adopted kids in you know, a family. So yeah,
I felt very connected to her, but you know, I
did always worry that, you know, she was very much
part of that world, and she still was, you know,
she married a kid that went to my school. They
moved to a community filled with a lot of other

(56:49):
people that went to the same schools, and there were
two new schools set up by Pa d and Opa
stay in that area too and started sending their kids
to those schools as well, So for them, the bubble
was definitely very intact. But I did get to the point,
after my mum had passed, and after my dad had
made his relationship with his mistress public and got engaged

(57:12):
and was, you know, trotting off to live his life.
I got to the point where I gave myself permission
to break out, break free and start exploring who I
really was. And I did meet someone, and based off
of that, I did come out to my sister, and
it was very apparent right after that that I was
no longer welcome in her house, which then led to

(57:36):
a lot of arguments and that, and we've tried many
times over the years to sort of bury hatchets, but
you know, the wounds a bit too deep.

Speaker 3 (57:47):
How was that for you, the person that like you
said that you were the closest to the only person
who knew how your experience was of being adopted and
a part of this family.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
How was that when she rejected you.

Speaker 2 (58:04):
I just I felt that there was no ground beneath
my feet anymore. So much had changed in such a
short period of time in the space of eighteen months.
My mum was dead, my dad was married to my godmother, which,
apart from the affair, is just kind of awkward and
weird and strange. And now I don't have the sister

(58:25):
that I always thought I had in my life, and
so I just I felt out of control and I
felt like I had no foundations. And you know, from
then on, I did make a series of really poor
decisions and choices for myself that were based on that
feeling of not having the foundation of family anymore. And
so while I'll absolutely wear the bad decisions that I've made,

(58:49):
I do have to, you know, in order to not
be an absolute lunatic in my own brain, I do
have to also acknowledge where some of those poor choices
came from. And that was the fact that I was
so heartbroken because I'd always thought that that relationship would
remain intact, and I just felt so unseen and unnecessary

(59:13):
in their lives in that moment.

Speaker 4 (59:15):
So I ran away.

Speaker 2 (59:17):
Essentially, I moved to the other side of the world
and just you were.

Speaker 3 (59:21):
In Hollywood, you were, you were in la and also
reading your book, you were you were such a hopeless
homosexual because you were so you were so naive and
it's so beautiful your innocence.

Speaker 2 (59:40):
Yeah, but it, you know, it gets you into trouble.
And that's sort of another thing.

Speaker 4 (59:43):
You know.

Speaker 2 (59:45):
I was twenty seven when I like came out, or
twenty eight even, and you know, I was still you know,
a stone cold when they call them a golden virgin,
and you know, I'd never done anything sexual and you know,
not even really kissed anyone before unless I was paid
to on camera, but that was always a girl.

Speaker 4 (01:00:04):
So yeah, I was just so new to it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
And so even though I was in my late twenties,
I was essentially approaching crushes and attractions and romance in
the way that you know, a twelve thirteen year old might.
You know, you see that sort of classic scene where
you know, young thirteen year old boy and girl they
break up and the girl runs up to a room
and slams the door.

Speaker 4 (01:00:26):
It's never coming out again. You know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
I was that but in my late twenties, because I'd
never had the opportunity to kind of flex how I
felt in myself in that sense, and that you know,
that got me into a lot of trouble because I
became too attached to the wrong people, especially because I
didn't anymore have the attachments at home backing me up
or being that safety net.

Speaker 1 (01:00:47):
You didn't have the emotional ballast.

Speaker 3 (01:00:50):
Exactly, Yeah, to keep you kind of tethered. But how
is it in Hollywood? So by this stage, obviously you're
very successful and you are living a dual life because
you're not out publicly. What do you manageers say in
Hollywood for male handsome of leading man age Yeah, it's

(01:01:14):
about sixus.

Speaker 4 (01:01:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
It's an interesting one because obviously the industry is somewhat
quite progressive in a sense, but as also isn't At
the end of the day, the entertainment industry is it's
about making money. When you make a movie, you have
to sell tickets. If you cast a handsome man in
the leading role for a big blockbuster, you're doing so

(01:01:36):
because you want all the women who have a crush
on him to go. If those women know that he's gay,
will they buy the tickets? So there is a little
bit of that sort of like, oh, we can't cast
a gay guy as a superhero or a leading man.
And you know, I had my agent at the time
literally said that to me on the phone he found
out that I was gay. I hadn't said anything to him,

(01:01:58):
but I was living with my boyfriend of the time
in Los Angeles and I'd gone to a house party
with friends and one of my agent's other clients was
there and had mentioned to my agent on the phone
that she saw me and my boyfriend together at the party.
So he then caught me up and got really angry
with me over the phone because I hadn't told him
this detail about my life. And I initially thought, well,

(01:02:20):
it's none of your business. But then from a professional standpoint,
if the view is that as a gay man, I
can't book leading roles or superhero roles, that affects his
ability to make money as well, if that is the case.
But I mean, ultimately, the joke was on them because
I'd already done both.

Speaker 3 (01:02:38):
So, Dick, how do you feel about your sexuality now?

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
Are they still shadows?

Speaker 4 (01:02:45):
Of course? The demons?

Speaker 2 (01:02:46):
You know, when you it was almost thirty years of
my life that I was living with all of that
sort of thought in my head.

Speaker 4 (01:02:53):
They'll always be there. There will always be questions.

Speaker 2 (01:02:56):
Even in writing this book, I had to really delve
deeply into my religious beliefs and what I was taught
and read a lot of texts and everything, And there's
always going to be those twangs of doubt and always
little moments of fear of.

Speaker 4 (01:03:10):
Like, oh, what what if I am wrong?

Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
Like am I now a vocal spokesperson for Satan because
I've written a book encouraging people to be themselves? Like?

Speaker 4 (01:03:20):
Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
But really, ultimately, you get to a point where you
have those demons, but you just put them in the corner.
You tell them to be quiet and as long as
you're going out every day and doing a good thing.
And I do genuinely believe that I'm doing a good
thing by writing this book. I don't think the just,
ever loving God that I was raised to believe in
would ever chastise.

Speaker 4 (01:03:42):
Me for that.

Speaker 1 (01:03:43):
I know. Are you in love?

Speaker 2 (01:03:44):
I am, yes, but a wonderful man by my side.
I feel a bit sorry for him. We met sort
of about three months before I started to go down
the road of being an advocate for the LGBTQI plus community.
That's been a very new journey for me and doing documentaries,
speaking out, doing stuff with politics, and now writing a book.

Speaker 4 (01:04:07):
It's all so new for me.

Speaker 2 (01:04:08):
And you know he's in there and so understanding and
patient throughout the whole thing. Honestly, I'm very lucky to
have him there. But you know, everything happens for a reason,
and it's it's all just been good stuff lately.

Speaker 4 (01:04:19):
So yeah, brilliant.

Speaker 3 (01:04:22):
He must be like what happened to party Tim?

Speaker 4 (01:04:26):
Definitely that.

Speaker 2 (01:04:27):
But you know, I've got a couple of months until
my fortieth birthday, and yeah, I'll make it up to him.

Speaker 1 (01:04:33):
Have you been back to the church community.

Speaker 4 (01:04:36):
Well, not really over stay.

Speaker 3 (01:04:37):
No.

Speaker 4 (01:04:38):
For a long time.

Speaker 2 (01:04:40):
After month passed away, and even after I came out
and was, you know, living with my partner and stuff,
I still attended Sunday Mass every week and still kept
that up because apart from you know that just being
part of the faith, it was a way that I
felt still connected to my mum because it was such
a big part of her life. But unfortunately, it does

(01:05:01):
get to a point if you're going once a week
to a place where someone's standing up there essentially telling
you how bad you are as a person. You get
to a point where you realize like you need to
look after your own mental health and make your own choices.
And I knew that I had a very deep connection
with the God that I believe in because of, you know,

(01:05:23):
the extremities of how I needed to pray at such
a young age that I thought, I'm quite happy to
continue in my life with my spirituality and my beliefs
and do so in a way that's not going to
harm me further in terms of mental health, but will
still keep me connected. And I'll do that in the
way that I communicate with others and how I help others.

(01:05:44):
And I think, you know, writing this book is it's
my way of, I guess, accessing the God within myself
and giving love out to the world by telling people
you're not alone, and by hopefully encouraging others who don't
realize how responsible they are for mental health damage to
maybe rethink their approach.

Speaker 3 (01:06:04):
Amazing, You've also changed legislation single handedly, superhero. Yeah, No,
that was such an honor.

Speaker 2 (01:06:15):
I started working with Equality Australia a couple of years
ago and I shared some of my stories. I spoke
about when I was taken to the hypnotherapist to have
the gay hypnotized out of me, and it was just
it was an opportunity to be able to maybe turn
that negative into a positive. Over the next few months,

(01:06:36):
together with some other survivors of conversion therapy practices, you know,
we ended up meeting with the Premiere of New South Wales,
Chris Mins, and we did a press conference at Parliament
House and we met with the sitting politicians and we
spoke to them about the importance of making conversion therapy
practices illegal because it's very vulnerable people that are being

(01:06:57):
exposed to them, and it is mentally damaging for people
and their self worth and their development, and the people
who will take people to that aren't willing to listen
to them or hear that. So therefore we do need
legislative change to protect them. And based off you know,
those conversations and us speaking our testimony, conversion therapy practices

(01:07:22):
are now illegal in the state of New South Wales.
So I feel tremendous, tremendously honored and humbled to have
been part of that.

Speaker 3 (01:07:28):
That will make a difference in lives. What my last
question to you, what would have made a difference in
your life when you were that boy being bullied.

Speaker 2 (01:07:43):
Being able to speak. But that is not an option,
and that is why after coming out, I guess on
national television when I did a four Corners episode with
Louise Milligan and then speaking further, you know, doing the
stuff about conversion therapy with Equality Australia and in Parliament.

(01:08:04):
When I was approached to write this book, I was
so reminded of how voiceless I felt when I was
going through it and what I needed when I was younger,
and that was someone to stand up for me because
I wasn't able to stand up for myself because it
was impossible. So I thought, I'm in a position where
I get to be that voice now and it would

(01:08:26):
be irresponsible of me not to do so. So that's
literally why I've done the book. It's almost I've a
pretty much written this book for my younger self.

Speaker 3 (01:08:37):
Yes, do you feel like you've gone back and scooped
him up?

Speaker 4 (01:08:41):
Yeah? I think so.

Speaker 2 (01:08:43):
And I think it has given me the ability to
talk directly to people who are experiencing it, and I
know what they need to hear and how they need
to hear it, and so even like you know, I've
helped the young me now because here I am today,
So maybe I can help them and be sort of

(01:09:03):
there for them and pass it forward. And you know,
I think we can save some lives by telling truthful stories,
and even if it's just one, that's of success.

Speaker 1 (01:09:14):
Tim Pocock, more power to you.

Speaker 3 (01:09:19):
I myself was raised in a religion that disapproves of,
for want of a better term, queerness in any form
or dissent. So Tim's story is a powerful reminder of
how much strength it takes to question everything you were
taught to believe. Everything about yourself, your faith, and your

(01:09:41):
place in the world has to be reconstructed when you've
left such an authoritarian regiment of belief. It's an extraordinary
story about conquering sometimes the strongest opponent that we have ourself.
The executive producer of No Filter is Nama Brown, the

(01:10:03):
senior producer is Bree Player. Sound design and editing by
Jacob Brown, and I'm your host, Kitline Brook. Thanks for
listening and we'll keep them coming.