Pseudonym of Norris Davey, born at Hamilton of conservative, puritanical, Methodist parents. After leaving school he took a job in a law office and began studying law extramurally.
His first great love, handsome Frank Gadd, four years older, was heterosexual (Davey's "type" was working men, several years older than himself.) They went on a holiday together to the Bay of Islands in 1924, during which Norris struggled to express his feelings, but nothing happened. Gadd later married Davey's sister Phyllis. Not long after, he briefly met and admired a horse-trainer, Harry Doyle, ten years older.
In 1927 he went to London where he found the opportunities he had failed to find in New Zealand. A handsome guardsman directed him to a public toilet and there revealed "the most monstrously large (and to me, as it turned out, attractive) 'thing' I had ever seen". The man offered Davey to let him do anything he liked with it for two pounds. He couldn't afford to, but he now knew what was available.
His first loving, sexual relationship was with a married 38 year old decorator, Fred Bush, whose father-in-law (!) took him out cruising. During a Continental walking tour, there was also an Italian, Carlo, with whom he stayed for several days.
On his return in 1928 (now calling himself Frank), he got a job with the Public Trust in Wellington. There he fell for another straight man, a night watchman, Don Doran (15 years older). It was about this time that he started writing in earnest. At night, he enjoyed "street adventures" in the bogs and beats of Wellington.
Unfortunately one of his tricks, Leonard Hollobon of Christchurch, was known to the police, who had set up a base in the next room of his boarding house. They burst in to find the two masturbating each other - "committing indecent assault".
Frank was persuaded to give evidence and allow himself to be presented as an "innocent" party. In return he received a suspended sentence; Hollobon got five years at hard labour in New Plymouth prison. The two never saw each other again, and Hollobon probably never identified his disastrous trick with the increasingly famous writer.
Possibly as a condition of his sentence, Frank went to stay with his much-loved uncle Oakley Sargeson at Okahukura near Taumarunui. Two years later, forced off his uncle's farm by the Depression, he emerged as Frank Sargeson, writer.
In May 1931 he moved to the family bach at Takapuna, where he spent the rest of his life. He had several other short but emotional affairs, and on the Auckland waterfront in 1935 ran into Harry Doyle, now barred from the track. They remained friends and weekend lovers for the rest of Harry's life. When his health declined, Harry stayed in the bach from 1967 till a month before he died in 1971.
Another lover was Jimmy Shaw, another manual worker, but for the first time, younger than Sargeson. After Harry's death, his main man was a Kaukapakapa subsistence farmer whom Michael King identifies only as M - but Sargeson wrote about as "the McGilly man", so we can take a wild guess at his surname. M later married a much younger woman and moved away from Sargeson emotionally - but still accepted large chunks of Sargeson's diminishing capital.
Sargeson referred obliquely to his sexuality in his first volume of autobiography, and movingly tells the story of Carlo in his third volume, but to Alec Pickard he "'admitted' that his only source of sex was with 'servant girls and prostitutes.'"
Later he was a public supporter of homosexual law reform - but he never liked the word "gay" (offering "yag" instead).
He died on March 1, 1982, and his ashes are sprinkled under a loquat tree on the Esmonde Rd property, which is maintained as a literary museum.
