{"id":7351,"date":"2026-02-28T08:48:15","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T22:48:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/veritysparks.com\/?p=7351"},"modified":"2026-03-02T10:02:53","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T00:02:53","slug":"if-i-were-you-by-peter-quarry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/?p=7351","title":{"rendered":"IF I WERE YOU by Peter Quarry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This was a very random pick from the library shelves; I was intrigued by the idea of a series of letters between two different parts of the one self.<\/p>\n

Peter Quarry is an Australian psychologist, entrepreneur, designer, TV personality, portrait artist and now writer. He had a peculiar childhood. His Australian father and German mother met in post-war Germany; she moved to Australia when they married, but sadly his father died young. There followed a period when his mother moved restlessly back and forth from Australia to Europe, not liking one and then being disappointed with the other, on repeat.<\/p>\n

She sounds like a nightmare –\u00a0 self-absorbed and yet smotheringly over-involved with Peter and, while not incestuous, inappropriately intimate. The way she shared details of her emotional life was not fair to a young boy…what was she thinking? And when she found an Italian lover, poor little Peter found himself piggy in the middle of a volatile relationship – literally – in a tiny flat in Rome. The Italian was shiftless; his mother was hopeless with money. So life was precarious.<\/p>\n

One of the key images from this period is young Peter dolled up in a smart suit, bow tie and all. Mother lived a fantasy life, a Hollywood movie of glamour and romance. She liked to travel by ship, and on those constant cruises he was made to dress in a suit and squire ladies at the shipboard dances. Talk about the stereotype ‘my mother made me gay’!<\/p>\n

After that insecure childhood, Quarry was always driven by the need for financial stability. So although he had a hedonistic, often risky gay lifestyle – Quarry doesn’t hold back on the clubbing, drug-taking and sexual adventuring – he was also a successful and wealthy psychologist and entrepreneur in the corporate training field.<\/p>\n

With age, Buddhism, health issues and a loving relationship (which was able to become a marriage because Australians chose marriage equality – yay!) Quarry decided to take stock by putting himself on the couch. His psychologist self, *’PQ’, asked questions, prompted tasks, commented and clarified as ‘Pete’ reviewed his life. This is a hybrid autobiography\/self help book, and so I briefly flirted with the idea of a life review myself, but in the end it was Pete’s life story that was most interesting. A great insight into the lives of gay men from the 1970’s on. There’s the sex, drugs & rock’n’roll of course, but also gay ageism, ‘coming out’, youth and beauty culture, prejudice, illegality and of course AIDS. It’s the era of my youth, too, and I thought about my gay friends, some lost now, with more understanding.<\/p>\n

*My husband, reading this post, did a little research. Apparently PIQ (Positive Intelligence Quotient) is a concept used by some psychologists, a little like EIQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient). Emotional Intelligence is often shortened to EQ. And Positive Intelligence, to PQ.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was a very random pick from the library shelves; I was intrigued by the idea of a series of letters between two different parts of the one self. Peter Quarry is an Australian psychologist, entrepreneur, designer, TV personality, portrait … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7351"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7360,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7351\/revisions\/7360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}