In most contexts, surreptitiously recording your fiancé’s conversations might seem like a red flag. But not for playwright Anthony Nocera and his partner Jamie Anderson.

Nocera was a young university student when the pair met, after a creative writing assignment saw him turn to a popular dating app for inspiration.

“I realised I had a grid of faces that, if I clicked on them, were potentially portals into stories,” Nocera tells InReview.

One of those faces was Jamie’s: tall, bearded, beaming, and twice Nocera’s age. Anthony hadn’t expected to fall in love, let alone get engaged, but they did. He also got his story as well.

“Every Tuesday night, Jamie and his best friend of many years, Justin, would go out on ‘sister dates’,” Nocera explains.

These two ride-or-dies would go out for dinner, a glass of wine, and invariably wind up back at Jamie and Anthony’s place for a cup of tea and a natter. It was here that the young writer had a front-row seat to a special double-act.

“Jamie became different when he was with Justin, in a really beautiful way,” he recalls. “He became funnier and gayer and more camp, and Justin too was so funny and so charismatic. I was really interested in the relationship, and how they’ve been drawn together by so much of their shared history.”

Nocera had never heard conversations like the ones unfolding in his living room. It was only natural that he hit record to capture the magic, not just for the side-splitting banter, but everything they’d seen and shared.

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“Conversations would almost always turn to people they’d lost; the AIDS crisis bubbled underneath a lot of the things they were talking about, and the horror of losing people, the insecurity of that time, the scariness of that time.

“I was really interested in the kind of generational rub between us – because that time was something that I really only had an understanding of through books and or horror movies.”

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Eventually, Anthony began writing a play inspired by the pair’s friendship. By day Nocera worked a string of jobs behind the scenes at some of South Australia’s leading performing arts companies, and by night he would write in bed next to Jamie, who read every draft in turn.

Set on the night before the funeral of one of Jamie and Justin’s mutual friends, it sees the fictionalised trio haunted by a “murderous leather daddy” – a satire of the menacing depictions of gay culture that were common during the AIDS crisis.

Nocera titled it Log Boy, named for a recurring – and possibly apocryphal – character who featured prominently in Jamie and Justin’s memories of the various gay beats found across Adelaide’s Park Lands.

“It was really an exploration of a kind of intergenerational politics, the different sexual politics between gay men who were born pre- and post-AIDS crisis.”

Just months before the play was set for a development workshop, however, Nocera and Jamie’s life together changed.

“In late 2022, Jamie passed away really unexpectedly” Nocera says. “And so I had this play where he was alive on page, that was at its core about grief in the abstract.”

Nocera decided to go through with the development.

“When we were in the room, we started to change it and make it more personal, and within my own experience and the particularities of losing someone,” he says, “And the play got way funnier, way more honest, way more vicious.”

Six years after Nocera first began working on the play, Log Boy finally hits the stage in October as part of State Theatre Company South Australia’s Spark program. Produced by Nocera’s own company – fittingly titled Smiling Bear – the play stars Paul Capsis and Paul Reichstein as Justin and Jamie, Anthony Nicola as Nocera himself, Elena Carapetis as his mother, and Chris Asimos haunting them in leather.

"The play got way funnier, way more honest, way more vicious."

“We’ve laughed a lot, even when the work is at its darkest or saddest,” he says. “There’s this really rich vein of comedy and heart and family that runs through it that was very healing for me, but also I think speaks to the experience of a lot of gay men who have found family in unlikely places.

“I was constantly told that it wasn’t possible; that it was too big, that it was too gay,” Nocera says of Log Boy’s long road to the stage. “[But] I don’t think it’s a massive stretch to put gay men on stage – and I think there are a lot of gay people or non-gay people who want to engage with a really big-hearted, strange comedy.”

Since he started writing Log Boy by Jamie’s side, Nocera has also worked on two additional plays – the similarly autofictional My Hair is Thinning, and Someone You Know for Brink Productions. An adaptation of Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli’s 1991 ground-breaking memoir about losing a friend to AIDS, Nocera’s Someone You Know script was recently shortlisted for the Jill Blewett Fellowship. While they all share common themes grief and love, Nocera says friendship is one of the most vital common threads.

“We don’t often speak about friendship in a romantic way in our culture,” Nocera reflects.

“Friendship, I think, can be as deep or as romantic and as tumultuous and as beautiful and sensual as any sort of as any other relationship, even if it’s platonic. Regardless of your [gender or] orientation, there’s a thing that happens when you find your people.

“That’s a very beautiful thing, and that doesn’t mean that it’s always easy. But that lived-in quality, that grittiness, is really beautiful and something that I love to play with on stage. It’s also really funny – nothing’s funnier than two friends on a roll.”

As for those recordings of Jamie and Justin? They’re still safely saved to Nocera’s phone. But they’re also being played out onstage.

“I have lots of photos and stuff, and to hear his voice is really nice,” he reflects.

“But in all of the rehearsals, hearing Paul Capsis and Paul Reichstein, who are playing Justin and Jamie respectively, click into the rhythm… it’s like they’re right there again. Yeah, it’s very uncanny and very beautiful, and very funny.”

Log Boy will run from October 1 – 10 at Adelaide College of the Arts