Kyriakos Gold on a series of missed cues, and why he quit every community board

For most of his life Kyriakos Gold, who gave the keynote, misread the signals without knowing he was reading them at all. That was the argument of the keynote he gave at Think Autism Melbourne on 30 May 2026, which he called A Series of Missed Cues. He was diagnosed only six or seven years earlier, and he described himself to the room as a six year old autistic person in a fifty year old body that had masked for a very long time.

Gold began in Greece, where he grew up. From the age of five his first identity was the violin. He carried it everywhere, had music lessons at night, and in Greece in the 1970s and 1980s that made him the violin boy. Then one sunny day in the courtyard a game of chasing, boys and girls together, stopped. The boys went off to play basketball. Gold stood there wanting to play the rope game with the girls, and for the first time he felt completely alone, because the world around him had just reorganised itself by gender and he had to pick a side. He told the audience this was the loneliness of being left behind by a world that was organising itself without consulting him, rather than of being disliked. He did not expect the rest of the class to consult him; it was systemic, and it happened fast.