'Walking through Chippendale on my way to Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre, where this production of Holding the Man is playing, I pass by the York Theatre. This was the theatre where, in 1985, Timothy Conigrave, author of the original memoir upon which the play is based, was rehearsing a touring show of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs. He had to excuse himself from one rehearsal for an appointment where he learned his HIV-positive diagnosis.' (Introduction)