Holding the Man is a 1995 memoir by Australian writer, actor, and activist Timothy Conigrave. It tells of his 15-year love affair with John Caleo, which started when they met in the mid-1970s at Xavier College, an all-boys Jesuit Catholic school in Melbourne, and follows their relationship through the 90s when they both developed AIDS. The book, which won the 1995 Human Rights Award for Non-Fiction, has been adapted as a play, a docudrama, and in 2015 a film starring Ryan Corr, Craig Stott, Anthony La Paglia, Geoffrey Rush and Guy Pearce. Caleo was captain of the school football team and the book's title "holding the man" refers to a transgression that incurs a penalty in Australian rules football. Holding the Man was published in February 1995 by Penguin Books in Australia just a few months after Conigrave's death, and has since been published in Spain and North America. It was described as a "Romeo and Juliet for the AIDS era", a "seminal account of the AIDS pandemic", "soul-shaking" and "one of Australia’s most beloved non-fiction books". It has been reprinted fourteen times and was listed as one of the "100 Favourite Australian Books" by the Australian Society of Authors for its 40th anniversary in 2003. In 2009 Penguin reissued it with an orange and white cover as part of their Popular Penguin series. In 2015 UK singer Sam Smith praised the memoir on their Instagram account: "The most powerful thing for me was how this book captured what it’s like to grow up gay and all those confusing scary and amazing moments I had coming out and realising who I was…this book and film pretty much changed my life". Plot In 1976, Timothy Conigrave, a student at a high school in Victoria, fell in love with the captain of the school football team, John Caleo. So began a relationship that was to last for 15 years, a love affair that weathered disapproval, betrayal, separation, and ultimately death. With honesty and insight, 'Holding the Man' explores the highs and lows of their life partnership: the intimacy, constraints, temptations, and the strength of heart both men had to find when they tested positive for HIV. The story opens at Kostka, Xavier's junior [preparatory] school in Melbourne. Here, the author begins to sexually experiment with other boys, and comes to the realisation that he is gay. Several years later, on his first