Memoir of masculinity, military service, pride

Brad Poulter’s honest, funny and at times heartbreaking memoir traces the story of a man who grew up in Oamaru through his service in the Royal New Zealand Navy while coming to terms with his sexuality, Jules Chin writes.
From small-town New Zealand to serving in Afghanistan, Brad Poulter’s journey with being comfortable with his sexuality is mirrored in the path of the navy’s itself.
 

Poulter’s nearly 20 years of service traverses a time of ‘‘don’t ask, don’t tell’’ through to being named the most inclusive defence force in the world in 2014.

It was ‘‘quite surreal’’ that Built For This — A Memoir of Masculinity, Military Service and Pride has now been released by publishers Allen & Unwin Aotearoa New Zealand, he says.

‘‘It’s been a long time coming and I didn’t really feel like it was real until I went on TVNZ’s Breakfast show today,’’ he tells the Oamaru Mail.

‘‘I thought ‘this has actually become quite a thing’.’’

Poulter says he wrote the memoir in an ‘‘unapologetically honest’’ way hoping to preserve his personal history of being gay in the military, to help not only others who came before him but those in service today.

‘‘Not everyone has had a great experience, or they’re still fighting who they are.

‘‘There’s totally some vulnerable things in there, alarming issues about sexual assault and suicide, there were probably only five or six people who had known about that before the book’s release and now that is out there to the world, so that’s been very healing for me, in terms of having to go though that writing process.

‘‘No-one would have known my story and it would have been lost to time,’’ he says.

Poulter says his memoir has ‘‘multiple arcs’’ in terms of gender equality, culture, masculinity and pride.

‘‘I wasn’t expecting it to turn out the way it has, but I’m very proud of it.’’

His career has included roles as a military police investigator, flight deck officer and maritime operational evaluator, as well as as a senior instructor in New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) leadership development.

The story begins with his formative years in North Otago where the foundations of his masculinity were laid down.

‘‘Oamaru is where it all began, it’s where my mates were, where I had my first real job, I talk about being brought up by butchers, which is a real key part of me finding who I was as a male in this world.’’

He says during his time as a student at St Kevin’s College there were ‘‘certain expectations’’ of what ‘‘guys said and did’’ that was part of the culture of the time.

‘‘In Oamaru in the ’90s, putting your thoughts into creative words — outside the narrow, approved male vocabulary — wasn’t one of those expectations,’’ he writes.

While he did not have the words for it then, he grew up knowing he was different.

His book opens with a chapter titled ‘‘Women of the South are Tough’’ in which he writes of his three older sisters and mother.

‘‘The kind who could shear a sheep in the morning, host a baby shower by lunch and still have time to defrost a bag of farm kill for dinner.’’

Poulter tells the Oamaru Mail he did not have a father figure until his teens, when his stepfather Malcolm entered his life.

His father left when he was 5 years old.

‘‘It was my sisters and my mum really, who toughened me up.

‘‘We didn’t have a lot growing up, but we had each other, which I think will resonate with a lot of families from the South,’’ he says.

After his butchery apprenticeship at New World supermarket and a stint working at The Last Post Restaurant and Bar in Oamaru, Poulter joined the Royal New Zealand Navy (RNZN) in 2001 at the age of 19.

Less than 10 years before Poulter joined it was illegal to serve in the Navy if you were gay, he says.

‘‘There’s a lot of people before me that didn’t have careers, and if they did, they were cut short — this is for them in a way, that I’m in a position now where I can finally tell a story a lot of people haven’t been able to share or tell at all.’’

Poulter’s deployments stacked up, including service in Afghanistan in 2005, the ‘‘pressure of pretending’’ collided with trauma, grief and the struggle for identity, till something gave way.

Poulter says he had ‘‘always loved to write’’ despite ‘‘slipping through the cracks’’ at school and he began documenting his time in the RNZN.

‘‘The first six or seven years in the navy, I wasn’t hiding in the closet waiting to come out, I was still understanding who I was.’’

Poulter was ‘‘outed’’ at work for being gay and while it was not on his own terms, or all ‘‘confetti and sparklers’’, he is glad he chose not to lead ‘‘two different lives, one at work and one in the shadows’’.

The memoir is about masculinity, how it is constructed, inherited and performed and what it takes to rebuild it on your own terms, he says.

If the same shift he experienced for gay rights in the RNZN, happened for women’s rights, it ‘‘would be incredible’’, he says.

Now as programme lead for Operation Respect at the NZDF, which has the goal to eradicate unacceptable and unwanted behaviours, Poulter says the role is a revolution.