Latest news with #TimPocock
The Advertiser
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
When you realise you're being subjected to gay conversion therapy
New releases include A Memoir of Freedom by Cheng Lei and King of Ashes by S. A. Cosby, the novel that sparked a bidding war. Tim Pocock. Hachette. $34.99. Tim Pocock, opera singer and actor in movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine and TV's Dance Academy, says he always knew that being gay was out of the question. Raised in a devout Catholic family and attending a prestigious private school with links to Opus Dei, he struggled desperately to hide his sexuality. As his musical and stage talents blossomed, bullying deepened his despair. After his mother, facing her own battle with ovarian cancer, convinced her only son to come with her to therapy, he realised he was being subjected to gay conversation therapy. Olympian Ian Thorpe calls Pocock's story of heartbreak and healing a "brave and important memoir". Lynette Ramsay Silver. Sally Milner Publishing. $39.99. "Now that I have uncovered so much more about what happened on Bangka Island, I refuse to stay silent, to be a party to any further cover-up." So writes Lynette Ramsay Silver in the foreword to her compelling book about Australia's most famous wartime nurse, Vivian Bullwinkel. Bullwinkel was the sole survivor when Japanese troops machine-gunned 21 military nurses and one civilian on Bangka Island, near Sumatra, in 1942. Silver writes that accounts of the atrocity were heavily sanitised and distorted, against Bullwinkel's wishes. The author's painstaking detective work reveals the brutal and shocking truth about what the nurses endured. Cheng Lei. HarperCollins. $35.99. Australian-Chinese television journalist Cheng Lei spent more than three years imprisoned in Beijing after being arrested in 2020 by the Chinese Communist Party's feared Ministry of State Security. Facing trumped-up charges for "supplying state secrets to overseas organisations" at a time when China had Australia in a COVID-era diplomatic deep freeze, it was clear that she was being used as human leverage - a victim of hostage diplomacy. Cheng, now a presenter for Sky News in Australia, has written a gripping, intimate and no-holds-barred account of her time as prisoner 21003 and the daily battle to maintain her health and sanity. Tom Gilling. Allen & Unwin. $34.99. In July 1942, Hitler's brilliant tactician, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, and his Afrika Korps, were closing in on Cairo. If the "Desert Fox" could defeat the Allies the Axis would control the Suez Canal, the oilfields of the Middle East and likely Malta and the Mediterranean. In their way, at El Alamein, was the British Eighth Army, stiffened by the 9th Australian Division and the 2nd New Zealand Division. Gilling paints a visceral picture of bloody battles fought in heat, chaos and desperation by men who refused to break. Churchill later described Rommel's defeat as "the end of the beginning". Moira Macdonald. Bloomsbury. $32.99. When you think of a love triangle, usually all parties are aware - to some extent - of what's going on. But nothing can be further from the truth with Moira Macdonald's debut novel. This charming story begins when April leaves an anonymous note in a book for Westley, the clerk at her local bookstore. But it's Laura who finds the note, thinking Westley left it for her. The two women start up correspondence with each other, while Westley is completely oblivious to everything unfolding around him. It's a heartwarming web of mistaken identities that is a love letter to books and the stores that house them. S. A. Cosby. Headline. $34.99. Shawn A. Cosby has been described as a "prince of the literary action thriller". Screen rights for King of Ashes, the Virginia-based writer's fifth Southern noir crime thriller, sparked a bidding war eventually won by Steven Spielberg, Netflix and the production company of Michelle and Barack Obama. That speaks volumes for the action, emotion and visual storytelling power of Cosby's Godfather-inspired saga of Roman Carruthers, a big-city investment banker, who returns home when a hit-and-run accident puts his father into a coma. Except, of course, it wasn't an accident and Roman's kin and their crematorium business now need his protection from ruthless local gangsters. Etgar Keret. Scribe. $29.99. The latest of Israeli writer Etgar Keret's collections of short stories - or "fictional thought-experiments" - to be translated into English contains 33 ruminations and shrewdly sketched observations of humanity and human interaction. Sometimes dark and sad and sometimes irreverent, these random vignettes range across all sorts of everyday scenarios of modern life, from yoga classes, TV game shows and AI companions, to weird flights of fancy with aliens, squirrels and time travel. The stories are concise and comic but hardly ever flippant as Keret takes only a few pages to explore with a wry but affectionate eye the ironies, anxieties and absurdities of contemporary existence. Lucy Nelson. Simon & Schuster. $32.99. Lucy Nelson's collection of short fiction stories about women who don't have children compassionately sketches a diverse array of characters who are not, and never will be, mothers - for all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of circumstances. And they feel every way it is possible to feel about it. Whether they've chosen their childlessness or not, each woman's inner voice explores the freedom, heartache, fear or humour of that child-shaped space in her life - from the ballet dancer whose body has betrayed her to the elderly spinster sisters with a found family, to the woman haunted by the ghost of a stillborn daughter. New releases include A Memoir of Freedom by Cheng Lei and King of Ashes by S. A. Cosby, the novel that sparked a bidding war. Tim Pocock. Hachette. $34.99. Tim Pocock, opera singer and actor in movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine and TV's Dance Academy, says he always knew that being gay was out of the question. Raised in a devout Catholic family and attending a prestigious private school with links to Opus Dei, he struggled desperately to hide his sexuality. As his musical and stage talents blossomed, bullying deepened his despair. After his mother, facing her own battle with ovarian cancer, convinced her only son to come with her to therapy, he realised he was being subjected to gay conversation therapy. Olympian Ian Thorpe calls Pocock's story of heartbreak and healing a "brave and important memoir". Lynette Ramsay Silver. Sally Milner Publishing. $39.99. "Now that I have uncovered so much more about what happened on Bangka Island, I refuse to stay silent, to be a party to any further cover-up." So writes Lynette Ramsay Silver in the foreword to her compelling book about Australia's most famous wartime nurse, Vivian Bullwinkel. Bullwinkel was the sole survivor when Japanese troops machine-gunned 21 military nurses and one civilian on Bangka Island, near Sumatra, in 1942. Silver writes that accounts of the atrocity were heavily sanitised and distorted, against Bullwinkel's wishes. The author's painstaking detective work reveals the brutal and shocking truth about what the nurses endured. Cheng Lei. HarperCollins. $35.99. Australian-Chinese television journalist Cheng Lei spent more than three years imprisoned in Beijing after being arrested in 2020 by the Chinese Communist Party's feared Ministry of State Security. Facing trumped-up charges for "supplying state secrets to overseas organisations" at a time when China had Australia in a COVID-era diplomatic deep freeze, it was clear that she was being used as human leverage - a victim of hostage diplomacy. Cheng, now a presenter for Sky News in Australia, has written a gripping, intimate and no-holds-barred account of her time as prisoner 21003 and the daily battle to maintain her health and sanity. Tom Gilling. Allen & Unwin. $34.99. In July 1942, Hitler's brilliant tactician, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, and his Afrika Korps, were closing in on Cairo. If the "Desert Fox" could defeat the Allies the Axis would control the Suez Canal, the oilfields of the Middle East and likely Malta and the Mediterranean. In their way, at El Alamein, was the British Eighth Army, stiffened by the 9th Australian Division and the 2nd New Zealand Division. Gilling paints a visceral picture of bloody battles fought in heat, chaos and desperation by men who refused to break. Churchill later described Rommel's defeat as "the end of the beginning". Moira Macdonald. Bloomsbury. $32.99. When you think of a love triangle, usually all parties are aware - to some extent - of what's going on. But nothing can be further from the truth with Moira Macdonald's debut novel. This charming story begins when April leaves an anonymous note in a book for Westley, the clerk at her local bookstore. But it's Laura who finds the note, thinking Westley left it for her. The two women start up correspondence with each other, while Westley is completely oblivious to everything unfolding around him. It's a heartwarming web of mistaken identities that is a love letter to books and the stores that house them. S. A. Cosby. Headline. $34.99. Shawn A. Cosby has been described as a "prince of the literary action thriller". Screen rights for King of Ashes, the Virginia-based writer's fifth Southern noir crime thriller, sparked a bidding war eventually won by Steven Spielberg, Netflix and the production company of Michelle and Barack Obama. That speaks volumes for the action, emotion and visual storytelling power of Cosby's Godfather-inspired saga of Roman Carruthers, a big-city investment banker, who returns home when a hit-and-run accident puts his father into a coma. Except, of course, it wasn't an accident and Roman's kin and their crematorium business now need his protection from ruthless local gangsters. Etgar Keret. Scribe. $29.99. The latest of Israeli writer Etgar Keret's collections of short stories - or "fictional thought-experiments" - to be translated into English contains 33 ruminations and shrewdly sketched observations of humanity and human interaction. Sometimes dark and sad and sometimes irreverent, these random vignettes range across all sorts of everyday scenarios of modern life, from yoga classes, TV game shows and AI companions, to weird flights of fancy with aliens, squirrels and time travel. The stories are concise and comic but hardly ever flippant as Keret takes only a few pages to explore with a wry but affectionate eye the ironies, anxieties and absurdities of contemporary existence. Lucy Nelson. Simon & Schuster. $32.99. Lucy Nelson's collection of short fiction stories about women who don't have children compassionately sketches a diverse array of characters who are not, and never will be, mothers - for all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of circumstances. And they feel every way it is possible to feel about it. Whether they've chosen their childlessness or not, each woman's inner voice explores the freedom, heartache, fear or humour of that child-shaped space in her life - from the ballet dancer whose body has betrayed her to the elderly spinster sisters with a found family, to the woman haunted by the ghost of a stillborn daughter. New releases include A Memoir of Freedom by Cheng Lei and King of Ashes by S. A. Cosby, the novel that sparked a bidding war. Tim Pocock. Hachette. $34.99. Tim Pocock, opera singer and actor in movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine and TV's Dance Academy, says he always knew that being gay was out of the question. Raised in a devout Catholic family and attending a prestigious private school with links to Opus Dei, he struggled desperately to hide his sexuality. As his musical and stage talents blossomed, bullying deepened his despair. After his mother, facing her own battle with ovarian cancer, convinced her only son to come with her to therapy, he realised he was being subjected to gay conversation therapy. Olympian Ian Thorpe calls Pocock's story of heartbreak and healing a "brave and important memoir". Lynette Ramsay Silver. Sally Milner Publishing. $39.99. "Now that I have uncovered so much more about what happened on Bangka Island, I refuse to stay silent, to be a party to any further cover-up." So writes Lynette Ramsay Silver in the foreword to her compelling book about Australia's most famous wartime nurse, Vivian Bullwinkel. Bullwinkel was the sole survivor when Japanese troops machine-gunned 21 military nurses and one civilian on Bangka Island, near Sumatra, in 1942. Silver writes that accounts of the atrocity were heavily sanitised and distorted, against Bullwinkel's wishes. The author's painstaking detective work reveals the brutal and shocking truth about what the nurses endured. Cheng Lei. HarperCollins. $35.99. Australian-Chinese television journalist Cheng Lei spent more than three years imprisoned in Beijing after being arrested in 2020 by the Chinese Communist Party's feared Ministry of State Security. Facing trumped-up charges for "supplying state secrets to overseas organisations" at a time when China had Australia in a COVID-era diplomatic deep freeze, it was clear that she was being used as human leverage - a victim of hostage diplomacy. Cheng, now a presenter for Sky News in Australia, has written a gripping, intimate and no-holds-barred account of her time as prisoner 21003 and the daily battle to maintain her health and sanity. Tom Gilling. Allen & Unwin. $34.99. In July 1942, Hitler's brilliant tactician, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, and his Afrika Korps, were closing in on Cairo. If the "Desert Fox" could defeat the Allies the Axis would control the Suez Canal, the oilfields of the Middle East and likely Malta and the Mediterranean. In their way, at El Alamein, was the British Eighth Army, stiffened by the 9th Australian Division and the 2nd New Zealand Division. Gilling paints a visceral picture of bloody battles fought in heat, chaos and desperation by men who refused to break. Churchill later described Rommel's defeat as "the end of the beginning". Moira Macdonald. Bloomsbury. $32.99. When you think of a love triangle, usually all parties are aware - to some extent - of what's going on. But nothing can be further from the truth with Moira Macdonald's debut novel. This charming story begins when April leaves an anonymous note in a book for Westley, the clerk at her local bookstore. But it's Laura who finds the note, thinking Westley left it for her. The two women start up correspondence with each other, while Westley is completely oblivious to everything unfolding around him. It's a heartwarming web of mistaken identities that is a love letter to books and the stores that house them. S. A. Cosby. Headline. $34.99. Shawn A. Cosby has been described as a "prince of the literary action thriller". Screen rights for King of Ashes, the Virginia-based writer's fifth Southern noir crime thriller, sparked a bidding war eventually won by Steven Spielberg, Netflix and the production company of Michelle and Barack Obama. That speaks volumes for the action, emotion and visual storytelling power of Cosby's Godfather-inspired saga of Roman Carruthers, a big-city investment banker, who returns home when a hit-and-run accident puts his father into a coma. Except, of course, it wasn't an accident and Roman's kin and their crematorium business now need his protection from ruthless local gangsters. Etgar Keret. Scribe. $29.99. The latest of Israeli writer Etgar Keret's collections of short stories - or "fictional thought-experiments" - to be translated into English contains 33 ruminations and shrewdly sketched observations of humanity and human interaction. Sometimes dark and sad and sometimes irreverent, these random vignettes range across all sorts of everyday scenarios of modern life, from yoga classes, TV game shows and AI companions, to weird flights of fancy with aliens, squirrels and time travel. The stories are concise and comic but hardly ever flippant as Keret takes only a few pages to explore with a wry but affectionate eye the ironies, anxieties and absurdities of contemporary existence. Lucy Nelson. Simon & Schuster. $32.99. Lucy Nelson's collection of short fiction stories about women who don't have children compassionately sketches a diverse array of characters who are not, and never will be, mothers - for all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of circumstances. And they feel every way it is possible to feel about it. Whether they've chosen their childlessness or not, each woman's inner voice explores the freedom, heartache, fear or humour of that child-shaped space in her life - from the ballet dancer whose body has betrayed her to the elderly spinster sisters with a found family, to the woman haunted by the ghost of a stillborn daughter. New releases include A Memoir of Freedom by Cheng Lei and King of Ashes by S. A. Cosby, the novel that sparked a bidding war. Tim Pocock. Hachette. $34.99. Tim Pocock, opera singer and actor in movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine and TV's Dance Academy, says he always knew that being gay was out of the question. Raised in a devout Catholic family and attending a prestigious private school with links to Opus Dei, he struggled desperately to hide his sexuality. As his musical and stage talents blossomed, bullying deepened his despair. After his mother, facing her own battle with ovarian cancer, convinced her only son to come with her to therapy, he realised he was being subjected to gay conversation therapy. Olympian Ian Thorpe calls Pocock's story of heartbreak and healing a "brave and important memoir". Lynette Ramsay Silver. Sally Milner Publishing. $39.99. "Now that I have uncovered so much more about what happened on Bangka Island, I refuse to stay silent, to be a party to any further cover-up." So writes Lynette Ramsay Silver in the foreword to her compelling book about Australia's most famous wartime nurse, Vivian Bullwinkel. Bullwinkel was the sole survivor when Japanese troops machine-gunned 21 military nurses and one civilian on Bangka Island, near Sumatra, in 1942. Silver writes that accounts of the atrocity were heavily sanitised and distorted, against Bullwinkel's wishes. The author's painstaking detective work reveals the brutal and shocking truth about what the nurses endured. Cheng Lei. HarperCollins. $35.99. Australian-Chinese television journalist Cheng Lei spent more than three years imprisoned in Beijing after being arrested in 2020 by the Chinese Communist Party's feared Ministry of State Security. Facing trumped-up charges for "supplying state secrets to overseas organisations" at a time when China had Australia in a COVID-era diplomatic deep freeze, it was clear that she was being used as human leverage - a victim of hostage diplomacy. Cheng, now a presenter for Sky News in Australia, has written a gripping, intimate and no-holds-barred account of her time as prisoner 21003 and the daily battle to maintain her health and sanity. Tom Gilling. Allen & Unwin. $34.99. In July 1942, Hitler's brilliant tactician, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, and his Afrika Korps, were closing in on Cairo. If the "Desert Fox" could defeat the Allies the Axis would control the Suez Canal, the oilfields of the Middle East and likely Malta and the Mediterranean. In their way, at El Alamein, was the British Eighth Army, stiffened by the 9th Australian Division and the 2nd New Zealand Division. Gilling paints a visceral picture of bloody battles fought in heat, chaos and desperation by men who refused to break. Churchill later described Rommel's defeat as "the end of the beginning". Moira Macdonald. Bloomsbury. $32.99. When you think of a love triangle, usually all parties are aware - to some extent - of what's going on. But nothing can be further from the truth with Moira Macdonald's debut novel. This charming story begins when April leaves an anonymous note in a book for Westley, the clerk at her local bookstore. But it's Laura who finds the note, thinking Westley left it for her. The two women start up correspondence with each other, while Westley is completely oblivious to everything unfolding around him. It's a heartwarming web of mistaken identities that is a love letter to books and the stores that house them. S. A. Cosby. Headline. $34.99. Shawn A. Cosby has been described as a "prince of the literary action thriller". Screen rights for King of Ashes, the Virginia-based writer's fifth Southern noir crime thriller, sparked a bidding war eventually won by Steven Spielberg, Netflix and the production company of Michelle and Barack Obama. That speaks volumes for the action, emotion and visual storytelling power of Cosby's Godfather-inspired saga of Roman Carruthers, a big-city investment banker, who returns home when a hit-and-run accident puts his father into a coma. Except, of course, it wasn't an accident and Roman's kin and their crematorium business now need his protection from ruthless local gangsters. Etgar Keret. Scribe. $29.99. The latest of Israeli writer Etgar Keret's collections of short stories - or "fictional thought-experiments" - to be translated into English contains 33 ruminations and shrewdly sketched observations of humanity and human interaction. Sometimes dark and sad and sometimes irreverent, these random vignettes range across all sorts of everyday scenarios of modern life, from yoga classes, TV game shows and AI companions, to weird flights of fancy with aliens, squirrels and time travel. The stories are concise and comic but hardly ever flippant as Keret takes only a few pages to explore with a wry but affectionate eye the ironies, anxieties and absurdities of contemporary existence. Lucy Nelson. Simon & Schuster. $32.99. Lucy Nelson's collection of short fiction stories about women who don't have children compassionately sketches a diverse array of characters who are not, and never will be, mothers - for all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of circumstances. And they feel every way it is possible to feel about it. Whether they've chosen their childlessness or not, each woman's inner voice explores the freedom, heartache, fear or humour of that child-shaped space in her life - from the ballet dancer whose body has betrayed her to the elderly spinster sisters with a found family, to the woman haunted by the ghost of a stillborn daughter.
ABC News
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Purity, hypnosis and hiding — how a gay teen survived Opus Dei
Tim Pocock grew up under the thumb of his charismatic, devoutly Christian mother. He went to a school with links to the controversial, secretive and conservative Catholic organisation, Opus Dei. There, he desperately tried to hide his sexuality, and was ruthlessly bullied for his musical and stage talents. Despite Tim's success in Australian opera, television, and in Hollywood blockbusters, he continued to harbour many secrets about himself and his family. One day his mother, who loved Tim deeply in her own way, and who was dying from ovarian cancer, convinced her only son to come with her to therapy. Instead of finally being able to talk about his struggles, Tim found himself being tricked into gay conversation therapy. For the last few months of his mother's life, he went to be hypnotised by a 'Catholic psychologist' every week, until eventually she died, and Tim was set free to learn how live by and for himself. Further information The Truth Will Set You Free: Growing up gay in Opus Dei is published by Hachette. You can stream the Four Corners report into schools with ties to Opus Dei, which features Tim, on ABC iview. The Pared Foundation's full responses to questions from Four Corners can be read here. Opus Dei Australia provided Four Corners with this statement. Find out more about the Conversations Live National Tour on the ABC website.
