Holding the Man is a 1995 memoir by Australian writer, actor, and activist Timothy Conigrave.

The book tells the story of Tim’s life, and centrally of his relationship with his husband and love of fifteen years, John Caleo. They met in the mid-1970s at Xavier College, an all-boys Jesuit Catholic school in Melbourne. The term “holding the man” refers to a transgression that incurs a penalty in Australian rules football. Caleo was a star footballer at high school, captaining the school’s team and winning the APS Best and Fairest trophy in 1976. He was also an avid supporter of the Essendon Football Club, one of the reasons Conigrave appropriated the term as the book’s title.

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 has been reprinted fourteen times. Holding the Man won the Human Rights Award for Non-Fiction in 1995 from Australian Human Rights Commission and was listed as one of the “100 Favourite Australian Books” by the Australian Society of Authors for its 40th anniversary in 2003.

It has been adapted into a stage play, film and documentary.