Pip: Brett Hayhoe has been writing an autobiography one episode at a time, and this week he gets to the part where other people were involved — which, as it turns out, did not always go smoothly.

Mara: This episode covers his relationship history — five partnerships across several decades, several cities, and one very consequential birthday remembered at exactly the right moment.

Pip: Let's start with the relationships themselves.

Boyfriends ~ I've Only Had a Few

Mara: The frame here is simple and a little disarming: five relationships, all of them ended, and brett is accounting for each one honestly — not to assign blame, but because accuracy is the only standard the series holds itself to.

Pip: He opens with a line that sets the whole tone: "You could count the number of partners I have had on one hand. Literally. Five fingers, five relationships, and — if I am being honest, which is rather the point of this series — five variations on the same unmitigated disaster."

Mara: That framing matters because he immediately walks it back just enough to be fair. He wasn't unlucky across the board — he was, in his own words, on occasion spectacularly lucky. What he did with that luck is the actual subject.

Pip: The first relationship is a teenage one, and he's clear-eyed about his own behavior: he said "I love you" too early, she started mentally booking the church, and his response was to withdraw — less contact, then less again, until the message landed without his having to deliver it.

Mara: He doesn't dress that up. He calls it "not a chapter I am proud of" and moves on.

Pip: The second relationship is the one that carries the most weight. A high school sweetheart, lost contact for years, and then — here's the hinge — he still knew her birthday. He mentioned it casually to her mother, the mother was taken aback, a phone call followed, and suddenly they were formally together.

Mara: What followed was, by his description, almost suspiciously orderly: dated a year, engaged a year, married a year, son arrived. He notes his son needed open-heart surgery at five days old, and he deliberately declines to fold that into this episode — he says some things are too large to share the page with someone else's chapter.

Pip: The marriage lasted seven years. He's careful about how he frames its end — they didn't separate because he was gay, they couldn't find their way back to each other once he was honest about being gay. He calls that a distinction worth making.

Mara: The remaining relationships move faster: a man from Sydney whose affections arrived when brett had nothing to spare; a second boyfriend who moved in with good intentions and the wrong emotional constitution; and then a man in Melbourne he was fond enough of to relocate his entire life for — who lasted seven months.

Pip: Seventeen years then passed before the fifth and, to date, last boyfriend, who already has his own episode and doesn't get compressed back into a paragraph here.

Mara: He closes by naming the two who stand apart — his ex-wife and the man he moved to Melbourne for — and admits he couldn't tell you whether that reflects well on his capacity for love or poorly on his timing.

Pip: Five endings, no court cases, no restraining orders. The bridges, he says, mostly just weathered away on their own.

Mara: What stays with me is the precision of the emotional accounting — he knows exactly where he fell short and doesn't flinch from it.

Pip: Timing, memory, the gap between what you feel and what you're ready for. More of that territory ahead, presumably.

Pip: Brett Hayhoe has lived what most people would call several full careers — and apparently still had evenings free to join more boards.

Mara: This episode follows one thread from Ask Brett: what happens when you give your time, your health, and your social life to community, and what you carry away from it.

Pip: Let's get into it — starting with the lessons community service actually teaches you.

Lessons in Community Service and Personal Growth

Pip: The question this post is really sitting with is what it costs to be useful — and whether the cost is ever acknowledged, by anyone, including yourself.

Mara: The post frames that cost plainly. After years of boards, committees, and advocacy roles, it lands here: "if you're doing this kind of thing for thanks or praise, you will be bitterly disappointed — so 'no expectations, no disappointments' became something close to a personal mantra."

Pip: That is not a mantra you arrive at on a good day. That is a mantra you chisel out after a long stretch of invisible labor.

Mara: The post traces exactly how that stretch accumulated. Moving to Melbourne after coming out, landing a role at JOY FM, and almost immediately fielding invitations to join boards — PLWHA Victoria, the VGLRL, Pride March Victoria, the Attorney-General's Advisory Committee on LGBTIQA+ community issues, NAPWA, GALTA. The list is not short.

Pip: At one point people were apparently asking, with a straight face, whether there was a board he didn't sit on.

Mara: And the answer involved only slight exaggeration. What the post is careful to say is that none of this felt like a burden at the time — the framing is direct: "if you identify as a member of a community, and you're capable and willing, you do whatever you can to support it."

Pip: Which is a generous philosophy right up until it quietly costs you your social ties.

Mara: That is precisely what the post names. Twelve years on the InterPride board — meaningful work, no regrets — but it created a slow disconnect from Melbourne. The observation is unsentimental: people who stop seeing you regularly at functions simply forget you. Not maliciously, the post says. Just efficiently.

Pip: Efficiently is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

Mara: After InterPride, the pattern repeated — political organisation, local council advisory committee, senior executive roles across several branches, back onto the VGLRL board. Then a serious illness in 2023 changed the shape of everything. Capacity narrowed. Community engagement narrowed with it, down to one local branch — which, the post notes, still turned out to be necessary.

Pip: Some form of human contact, it seems, is non-negotiable even for a confirmed hermit.

Mara: That is almost verbatim what the post says. And the conclusion it reaches is that the work mattered, the reasons were right, and that has to be enough — because it always was.

Pip: What stays with me is that "no expectations, no disappointments" sounds like resignation but reads, in context, like hard-won clarity.

Mara: It is the difference between giving up on recognition and never needing it in the first place. More from Ask Brett next time.

Pip: Brett Hayhoe has a private taxonomy for the people who matter most — and today's episode is built entirely from that list.

Mara: That's right. We're spending this episode inside one post from brett's World Traveller Series — three friendships, twenty-two-plus years, and everything that's quietly shifted in between. Let's start with the trio themselves.

The Two Elizabeths and Daddy

Mara: This segment of the World Traveller Series is about what long friendships actually look like over two decades — not the highlight reel, but the drift, the estrangement, the doors left open anyway.

Pip: The post introduces all three by way of a framing device: affectionate nicknames that mark them as people held, as brett puts it, "nearer and dearer — a private taxonomy of people who matter most."

Mara: M comes first, and the introduction is specific. Brett met him performing drag at a local club, and the reason M caught his attention was craft. The post is direct about it: "The ability to sell a song you are not actually singing is a talent worthy of genuine praise, and M had it in abundance."

Pip: That's not a small compliment. The post spends real time on what lip sync actually requires — the costume, the delivery, the commitment — before landing on what M became: the friend who showed up during the dark days, without hesitation, without complaint.

Mara: The post says M's counsel "probably saved my life or at least my sanity." That's the weight behind the entertainer framing. M is described as funny, loyal, loving, and courageous — the lip sync is the introduction, not the whole person.

Pip: H arrives through a different door entirely — the Pride March Victoria board, which is, as the post notes, "not the worst way to meet someone."

Mara: H is described as a sweet soul, often misunderstood, genuinely missed. There's been some estrangement. Brett has reached out; it hasn't been reciprocated. The post's response to that is quiet: "He knows — or ought to know — that I am here, should he ever need me. The door is open."

Pip: And then there's Daddy — met by chance at a nightclub, inseparable for a stretch, weekly parties, shared politics, shared experience of marriages that didn't survive. A natural pairing on paper.

Mara: In practice, the post describes a quick temper and what it calls an "occasionally misguided recalcitrant attitude" — a pattern of being cut off, presumably as a lesson. Brett's position on that is unambiguous.

Pip: The post says, simply, "This sort of nonsense does not work with me." Which is about as clean a boundary as you'll find in print.

Mara: The conclusion pulls all three together: three different introductions, three different shapes of friendship, each with its own complications. The post's final note is that all three are still there after twenty-two years, and that fact alone says something true about them.

Pip: A private taxonomy, a Pride board, a nightclub by chance — and two decades of whatever comes after the introduction.

Mara: The World Traveller Series keeps returning to that question. More from brett next time.

Pip: Brett Hayhoe writes a piece about his father, and the whole thing fits on a coaster — his words, not mine, though I'd argue that's generous.

Mara: This episode covers one piece of personal memoir — a portrait of a complicated father-son relationship, the grandparents who came and went, and the small, consequential moments that outlasted all of it.

Pip: Let's get into it.

Father Dearest

Mara: The frame here is memory and distance — what it means to know a parent mostly from the outside, through visits rather than daily life.

Pip: The post opens with a line that sets the whole tone: "If I were asked to write my memories of my father, I could fit them on a coaster. Not a large one, either."

Mara: And that's not just a rhetorical flourish. His parents separated when he was five. His father was already someone he visited, not someone he lived with. The coaster isn't self-pity — it's an accurate measurement.

Pip: What fills those memories is interesting, though. Caravan park weekends. Ditties and little rhymes that still surface decades later, uninvited. He describes them as good memories — fun ones, even.

Mara: But the post doesn't stop there. Alongside the rhymes were other lines — observations about who he was and who he apparently should have been. Working on cars meant, more often than not, being yelled at or quietly diminished.

Pip: The grandparent section adds another layer. Being the youngest of five, born well after his siblings, meant people started dying earlier relative to his own age. Grandparents were mostly absent or gone before he arrived.

Mara: The exception is striking. His father's mother spent her final months in the family home — cared for by his mother, who by all accounts despised the woman. The post doesn't editorialize heavily there. It just notes: that's character.

Pip: Then there's the cigarettes. He was ten, stealing them from his father's packet during infrequent visits. It's the detail that quietly detonates the whole piece.

Mara: Because smokers always know exactly how many are left. His father must have known the whole time and said nothing. That silence is doing a lot of work.

Pip: His father died at seventeen — chronic lung disease, months of difficult decline. The post describes it plainly: constant gasping, someone trying and failing to breathe.

Mara: He closes without resolution, which feels right. "He gave me a handful of rhymes I still say out loud, a lifelong health complication I picked up trying to be closer to him, and not much else in the way of warmth."

Pip: A punchline and a warning. That's the inheritance.

Mara: Memory, distance, and the things that outlast a relationship — that's the territory this one covers.

Pip: More from brett next time. Worth coming back for.

Pip: Ask Brett is running a travel series, and the latest stop is southeastern Queensland — which, based on what brett has written, is less a destination and more a stress test for family civility.

Mara: This episode covers that story in full — a mother-and-son train trip, a family visit that came apart, and a teenage night out that accelerated the whole collapse. Let's start with the trip itself.

Dorothy, George and David — Not Exactly the Trip of a Lifetime

Pip: The setup here is almost classical: a family that doesn't quite get along decides the cure is a visit. Joanie and her son travel Queensland Rail from Cairns to the southeast, and the stated ambition is modest — see Dorothy, keep the peace, come home.

Mara: The post is direct about how fragile that ambition was from the start. Brett writes: "she came from a large family, and at any given moment, at least two siblings would not be speaking to at least one other. The mathematics of the conflict were impressive."

Pip: So the peace-keeping mission was always operating on thin margins. What tips it over isn't the family tension directly — it's the cousin.

Mara: David. He's involved with a church group and extends an invitation. Permission is granted. What follows is described carefully: "the amount of alcohol consumed bore no relationship whatsoever to any version of scripture I have ever encountered."

Pip: A church trip that was not, in any meaningful sense, a church trip.

Mara: The return to Dorothy and George's house is where the consequences land. Getting back in undetected fails completely — they're caught. The personal trouble is immediate, but the larger fallout is between Joanie and Dorothy. The dormant tension in the family finds its occasion, and the visit doesn't survive the weekend.

Pip: Queensland Rail takes them home ahead of schedule. Which is the kind of sentence that contains an entire argument without spelling it out.

Mara: What the post doesn't do is wallow in the disaster. There's a closing note that reframes the whole thing: David is still in the contacts list, they've shared drinks in Melbourne since, and the misadventure reads as considerably more amusing now than it did on the train north.

Pip: Time does that. The southeast of Queensland receding through a window probably felt worse than it reads forty years later over a beer with your cousin.

Mara: Joanie, the post notes, would not entirely concur with that assessment.

Pip: Family trips that go sideways and somehow produce lasting friendships — there's a whole genre there.

Mara: Brett's World Traveller series keeps finding those stories. More to come.

Pip: Ask Brett is where brett turns lived experience into something worth sitting with — and this episode, there's one story that asks a question most of us would rather not answer.

Mara: The territory today is friendship — specifically, what a twenty-five-year relationship looks like when it forms in an unlikely place, holds through real crises, and then quietly stops.

Pip: Let's start with Adam.

Adam — Twenty-Five Years, Then Silence

Mara: The post frames this as a friendship that found its correct shape over time — but the shape it eventually took is the part that's hard to account for.

Pip: The origin story alone earns its own paragraph. Brett was moderating a chat floor — pre-social-media, early adopter, the works — and that's where Adam appeared. A flight from Cairns to Melbourne was booked. A week in a motel followed. And then, because geography and timing intervened, it became something else entirely.

Mara: The post is precise about how that transition happened. Adam disclosed, honestly and without drama, that he'd recently separated from a boyfriend and wasn't ready to move into something new. Brett writes that "the conversation was honest and comfortable — no drama, no difficulty. We were both at ease with it."

Pip: And that ease, it turns out, was the foundation. Not the Melbourne week — the conversation after it.

Mara: What followed was roughly twenty-five years of irregular but reliable contact. Not constant — the post is clear that it wasn't designed that way. Regular phone calls, occasional catch-ups, and the knowledge that serious moments would be met seriously. There were arguments. Long silences after some of them. But contact always resumed, and the post notes honestly that the first move, each time, was Adam's.

Pip: There's a line that earns its weight: when Brett was going through a serious stretch involving someone named Adi, Adam was "on the phone with me, practically around the clock, for as long as it took." That's not a supporting character. That's the friendship doing its actual job.

Mara: The last act is a recent move. Adam was the only person who immediately offered to help — fully, practically, without qualification — while managing his own health issues. Brett writes, "I have wished, more than once, that he could see it," referring to the completed place Adam helped make possible.

Pip: Then a series of misunderstandings — details kept private, which is the right call — and several months of silence.

Mara: The post doesn't resolve it. Brett writes that whether they'll communicate again "is genuinely unclear," and that the door remains open. A twenty-five-year friendship that survived arguments and crises, ended not by a falling-out but by something quieter and harder to name.

Pip: Which is, honestly, the more difficult kind.

Mara: The thread running through this is what reliability actually looks like in a long friendship — and how its absence registers when it stops.

Pip: The door's still open. Whether it gets walked through — that's the question the next chapter would have to answer.

Pip: Ask Brett, where every episode is a reminder that the best stories are about people, not places — even when the places are very good.

Mara: Today we're spending time with one of brett's World Traveller pieces, a portrait of a friendship built across Pride events, late nights, and at least one very long cookbook session.

Pip: Let's start with the friendship itself.

Tiny

Mara: This segment is about what a long-distance friendship actually looks like when you strip away the sentiment — what it's made of, what it costs, and what makes it last.

Pip: The post opens with a description that does a lot of work in very few words. Brett writes: "Drinking partner. Gogo Club companion. Friend and confidante. A very condensed list that encapsulates Paul and my friendship."

Mara: That compression is the point. The post is called Tiny — and the title earns itself. It's a short piece about a large friendship, and the economy of language mirrors the economy of a relationship that doesn't need constant maintenance to stay real.

Pip: Paul lives on Staten Island, which Brett notes is one of the most conservative places in New York City, and he's described as a protector and defender — unapologetically and unconditionally. That context matters. Choosing to be someone's champion in that environment is a specific kind of loyalty.

Mara: The post traces the friendship through InterPride AGMs and World Conferences, where Paul was reliably the one who knew where to go. But the moment that stands out is the cookbook story. Brett writes that they had twenty-four hours to produce a fundraiser cookbook for InterPride, and they stayed awake for all twenty-four of them to do it.

Pip: A sleepless cookbook sprint as a highlight of a life well lived — honestly, worse things have been said about creative partnerships.

Mara: Brett calls it "probably one of the most memorable creative experiences of my life," which tells you something about what he values. Not the keynote speech at Staten Island Pride's World AIDS Day event — though that went well and earned a résumé line — but the all-night work done alongside a friend.

Pip: The post closes on something quietly confident: that if they were to meet again, they'd simply pick up where they left off. That's the whole argument for this kind of friendship.

Mara: And Brett names it plainly — "I am a very lucky man to have Paul in mine."

Pip: Loyalty, late nights, and a cookbook nobody asked for but everyone needed.

Mara: The World Traveller series keeps returning to the people who made the travel mean something. More of that next time.

Pip: Ask Brett is where brett hayhoe writes about the things that actually shaped him — and this time, that means going back to the very beginning.

Mara: Today we're in the World Traveller series, the Relationships chapter, and the subject is the woman at the center of it all: his mother, Joanie.

Pip: Let's start with the portrait itself.

My Mother, Joanie

Pip: This segment is about what it means to reconstruct a relationship from memory — the early warmth, the rebellious years, the loss — and what survives when the details start to blur.

Mara: Brett sets the frame right at the top, and it's worth reading directly: "There is a particular kind of love that exists between a boy and his mother — one that resists easy description. Some of what follows may not be entirely accurate. It is based on memory — and memory, as I have learned, is not always a reliable narrator."

Pip: So the whole piece is already doing something honest before it's done anything else — it's not claiming to be a documentary. It's claiming to be true in the way memory is true.

Mara: And the stories that follow bear that out. He was an unplanned pregnancy his father didn't know about until a chance encounter at a clinic. His mother's response to the family pushing for Mervyn Walter Jr. was, quote, "Over my dead body." He became Brett instead.

Pip: That one line tells you everything about Joanie as a character before she's even properly introduced.

Mara: The childhood he describes is genuinely happy — weekends at his sister's cane farm in Mossman, a large extended Queensland family, a close relationship with his mother. Then a guard dog attack at a family visit nearly costs him his life, a tooth mark on his skull and another a millimetre from his jugular.

Pip: And Joanie's response to her son nearly losing his face was to buy him a ventriloquist doll. Which is either inspired parenting or the most Queensland solution to a trauma ever recorded.

Mara: He notes, with some dry acknowledgment, that because he couldn't open his mouth far to speak, he actually got quite good at it. The teenage years bring two set pieces — being packed off to his sister Rae's after a silent treatment standoff, then fetched back less than a week later, and a late-night Mini versus gutter situation that ended with both siblings conscripted to help their father pull the engine apart.

Pip: The car story lands as comedy, but underneath it is a father teaching his kids how things work. That detail earns its place.

Mara: The piece ends where it has to. His mother's passing in his mid-twenties, and this: "Not a day goes by that I don't think about her in some way, shape, or form. She played such a pivotal role in my life, and life since her passing has never quite been complete."

Pip: He closes by wishing he could remember more. That's the whole essay in four words.

Mara: Memory as an unreliable narrator, love that resists easy description — these are the themes that stay with you.

Pip: Next time, more from the Relationships series. Some stories you need a little distance to tell.

Pip: Ask Brett is where the personal gets published — and brett does not flinch.

Mara: Today we're in the World Traveller series, deep in the territory of relationships, deception, and what gets left behind when trust is broken beyond repair.

Pip: Heavy territory. Let's start with the story of Adi.

Adi – Deception Has a Name

Mara: This segment is about a relationship that was never what it appeared to be — three years of emotional investment in someone who, it turns out, was engineering every moment of it.

Pip: The post doesn't bury the conclusion. It opens with this: "The truth, I would later understand, is that he was playing me the entire time. His affections were a performance — designed to keep me on a string in the hope I would deliver him back to Melbourne."

Mara: That's the shape of the whole story in two sentences. What follows is the detail of how that performance was sustained — across borders, a pandemic, and years of silence.

Pip: It starts with a Sunday afternoon hookup that ends the moment Adi gets what he came for. Then a long silence, then a call from an Uber window, then three years of an internet relationship conducted from India while Australia's borders were closed.

Mara: And during those three years, real things happened. His family contracted Covid. His sister outed him to his parents. And then there were, as the post puts it, "the months — plural — when he simply and unapologetically vanished without a single word of communication."

Pip: Months. Plural. And yet every favour was called in, every political contact leveraged, until a visa was arranged. That is a staggering amount of effort directed at someone who was running a performance.

Mara: The arrival lands on New Year's Day, following three cancelled return dates — none of them communicated in advance. Within ten days, brett was in The Alfred ICU: collapsed kidneys, advanced pneumonia, a heart under the weight of accumulated stress. Five days with no memory. Full dialysis.

Pip: And while that was happening, Adi left. He never returned.

Mara: The post is precise about what followed: "He stole from me. He lied to me. He abandoned me when I needed someone most. He treated me as though I were rubbish to be discarded."

Pip: That sentence doesn't reach for poetry. It doesn't need to.

Mara: What it leaves behind is documented just as plainly — trust issues described as running deep, and a decision, quiet but firm, not to pursue another relationship. The post frames it as a lesson the universe intended. Sad, perhaps, but true.

Pip: Deception at that scale doesn't just end a relationship — it rewrites how you read every one that came before it.

Mara: The World Traveller series keeps going. There's more of this story still to tell.

Pip: Ask Brett is where travel memoirs, relationship philosophy, and neighbourhood sociology collide — and somehow it all holds together.

Mara: Brett Hayhoe opens a new series today, and the territory is relationships in the broadest sense — the people met across years of travel who left a mark, and the ones who simply never left at all.

Pip: Let's start with the friendship that anchors the whole series — Alan, Estelle, and Astoria.

Alan, Estelle, and the Friendships That Last

Mara: This series, World Traveller Series III, opens with a clear statement of scope — not just romance, but the full range of human connection made across years of travel.

Pip: And the first relationship on the page is the one that has outlasted every other — a friendship that began in Vancouver and deepened over years of visits to New York.

Mara: The post is direct about what Alan represents: "The most significant relationship made across all those years of travel — and the one still kept in constant contact to this day — is Alan."

Pip: That's a significant thing to put at the top of a series about relationships. Not a romance, not a family member — a friend. The post makes a quiet argument that friendship can be the defining relationship of a life.

Mara: And Alan's mother Estelle enters the story as something close to a third axis of that friendship. The post describes her as "a southern belle and one of the loveliest ladies I have ever met" — someone who generated enough material for a hundred volumes across a decade of visits.

Pip: The post delivers exactly one of those volumes, and it is a masterclass in comic timing — Estelle using a farewell hug to stage a performance for the neighbours, whispering that she wanted them to think she had a young boyfriend. Estelle understood the audience.

Mara: There's also the moment Alan asks for a promise before a visit — specifically, not to laugh at his sister's accent. The post notes, with some understatement, "I really should have reserved that answer."

Pip: The sister arrives and it is, apparently, like meeting Fran Drescher. The composure held until a suitable moment outside. That is the only honest outcome.

Mara: Beyond the family, the post spends real time on Astoria itself — the international deli, the Crescent Lounge bar, the framed photograph that now hangs in Melbourne, and Broadway's mix of languages on any given morning: Yiddish, Greek, and at least one more unidentified entirely.

Pip: A neighbourhood portrait assembled from overheard arguments and morning coffee. There is also a small note on the outer-borough elevated train — the el — and the announcement voice at every station that apparently sounded close to a cartoon character.

Mara: What the post is really doing, across all of that detail, is building a picture of belonging. Not as a tourist, but as someone who became part of the neighbourhood, part of Alan's family, and part of the Pride community that connected them.

Pip: The relationships series has set a high bar for its first episode. The closing will have a lot to live up to.

Mara: The series is called Relationships, but what the first episode actually maps is belonging — the kind that accumulates slowly across years and visits.

Pip: Estelle's neighbours got a show. The rest of us got the story. Not a bad trade.

Mara: More episodes to come — and apparently, a hundred volumes of material still waiting.