Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  enquiries@blackincbooks.com

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Introduction and selection © Benjamin Law 2019

  Benjamin Law asserts his moral rights in the collection.

  Individual stories © retained by the authors, who assert their rights to be known as the author of their work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  9781760640866 (paperback)

  9781743821084 (ebook)

  Cover by Grace Lee

  Text design and typesetting by Tristan Main

  Contents

  Introduction by Benjamin Law

  Freedom of Heart by Holly Throsby

  Shame and Forgiveness by David Marr

  How to be Both by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

  Rob, and Queer Family by Nayuka Gorrie

  Caritas by Jack Kirne

  St Louis by Oliver Reeson

  Boobs, Rags and Judy Blume by Phoebe Hart

  From Dreams to Living by Nadine Smit

  The Most Natural of Things by Justine Hyde

  Binary School by Roz Bellamy

  Why I’ve Stopped Coming Out to My Mum by Vivian Quynh Pham

  Training to Be Me by Cindy Zhou

  The Watering Hole by Samuel Leighton-Dore

  Car Windows by Tim Sinclair

  Bent Man Running by Steve Dow

  The Bent Bits Are the Best Bits by Jax Jacki Brown

  Reunion by Kelly Parry

  You Can Take the Queer Out of the Country by M’ck McKeague

  The Risk by Thom Mitchell

  When Worlds Collide, Words Fail by Thinesh Thillainadarajah

  Radelaide/Sadelaide by Gemma Killen

  LGBTI-Q&A: William Yang

  LGBTI-Q&A: Georgie Stone

  LGBTI-Q&A: Tony Ayres

  LGBTI-Q&A: Sally Rugg

  LGBTI-Q&A: Kate McCartney

  LGBTI-Q&A: Christos Tsiolkas

  Coming In by Joo-Inn Chew

  Androphobia by Heather Joan Day

  Living in a Fridge by Michael Farrell

  Wanting by Fiona Wright

  Coming Out, Coming Home by Adolfo Aranjuez

  The Wall of Shame by Natalie Macken

  Meinmasha by Atul Joshi

  Kissing Brad Davis by Scott McKinnon

  Something Special by Rebecca Shaw

  Floored by Nic Holas

  Not Special by Tim McGuire

  Jack and Jill and Me by Stephanie Convery

  To My Man of Seventeen Years by Henry von Doussa

  Angry Cleaning by Nathan Mills

  The Exchange by Alice Boyle

  Faggot by Beau Kondos

  So You Wanted Honesty . . . by Sue-Ann Post

  Sometimes I Call You Even Though I Know You Can’t Answer. It’s a Symbol, I Think . . . by Anthony Nocera

  How Not to Quench Your Thirst by Jean Velasco

  Silence and Words by Aron Koh Paul

  homosexual by Mike Mullins

  A Robust Game of Manball by Patrick Lenton

  The Equality of Love by Yamiko Marama

  A City Set Upon a Hill by Dang Nguyen

  Trust Me (Tips for My Teenage Self) by Thomas Wilson-White

  About the editor

  About the contributors

  Introduction

  Benjamin Law

  Some things I wish I’d had, growing up queer in Australia:

  •clothes that fit

  •less acne

  •wavy hair like the local hot white surfer boys

  •queer role models

  •stories that spoke to me

  •gay porn.

  Eventually I’d figure out how to access the first three things by shopping in Asian clothing outlets, getting a prescription for Roaccutane, and paying good money for a bad Korean man-perm I don’t particularly want to discuss right now, please respect my privacy. But those last three things – queer people, stories and depictions of queer sex – proved much harder to find, and I craved them with a desperation that bordered on hunger. Growing up in pre-dial-up-internet Queensland, the last mainland Australian state to decriminalise homosexuality, any scrap of queer connection or recognition was a hard thing to come by.

  So what did I have? Well, there was the ‘H’ volume of our family’s set of Encyclopædia Britannica. As a kid, when I was sure no one was around, I’d fervently flip to the entry on ‘homosexuality’, feeling sick, my heart thumping. Though it couldn’t have been more than one or two paragraphs long, the entry represented the entirety of all knowledge available to me at the time about being gay, beyond snickering schoolyard jokes about AIDS and anal sex, which I weakly laughed along with.

  As a teenager, there was our household copy of Everything a Teenage Boy Should Know – the popular coming-of-age sex-education tome every parent seemed to give Australian kids born in the 1970s and 1980s, written by Sydney doctor John F. Knight. In Chapter 14, titled ‘Unnatural Sex’, Knight wrote of gay sex:

  The method most commonly attributed to males indulging in this form of sexual gratification is intercourse (if such a word can be used in this context) via the back passage. Most normal people would regard this form of indulgence as less than attractive, and indeed downright repulsive.

  Lovely thing for a twelve-year-old to read. Truly. But by then, puberty was hitting hard, and not even Dr Knight calling gay sex ‘repulsive’ could stop me from scouring TV Week every Monday for art-house movies on SBS that were rated MA, featuring S (sex scenes), N (nudity) and A (adult themes), and setting the VHS timer accordingly. The A was especially important: ‘adult themes’ combined with ‘sex’ and ‘nudity’ usually meant queer stuff. Without A it was mostly just heterosexual sex, and who wanted that? While SBS movies rated MA (A, S, N) weren’t exactly the piping-hot gay porn that I craved, watching them throughout the late 1990s meant I was thoroughly familiar with the collected works of Pedro Almodóvar, Todd Haynes and Gregg Araki by the age of fifteen. One benefit of being a repressed gay teen in the suburbs: you come out literate in art-house cinema auteurs.

  The internet was a slow revolution. It was only in my final years of high school that my parents – riddled with divorce guilt – caved and bought us a Hewlett-Packard desktop computer. It was state-of-the-art, with a whopping sixteen-gigabyte (!) hard drive, a base roughly the size of a small microwave and a modem built inside the computer. We were living in the future. Needless to say, the first thing I did when I got online in private was to look up gay porn on AltaVista. As one single explicit gay jpeg of two white meatheads going at it in jockstraps loaded – frame by painful frame – I watched with horror as the monitor was infested with pop-up porn advertisements from hell. As footsteps approached, it was a mad sweaty scramble to simultaneously hide the plague-like pop-ups and my popped-up boner, the whole exercise feeling like I was being punished before I’d got any reward.

  *

  On reflection, it’s odd that I grew up without meeting any other openly queer people, and with so little exposure to stories with which I could identify. As Oliver Reeson writes in their essay about being non-binary:

  When I look back on my own life, I feel the weight of not realising earlier who I was, of being scared to tell the whole story. And yet, how could I realise I was a non-binary person when I did not even know of the concept until I was already an adult? How could I have grown
up as a non-binary person when it was not a story I had ever heard?

  As a reader, I look for two things in other people’s stories. The first is the kind of self-recognition Reeson talks about. For queer people it’s especially important, because while other forms of prejudice – like racism – can make you feel just as alone and isolated, ethnic minorities like me go home to families and communities who share our backgrounds and experiences, and affirm who we are. Queer kids growing up typically don’t have that. I didn’t. That feeling of belonging – of understanding you are not alone and not insane – is a core human need. If we can’t get that from the people around us, we need stories.

  The second thing I look for in stories is the opposite of selfrecognition: experiences completely outside my own personal framework. As much as queer people share experiences of marginalisation, fear and facing baseless assumptions about who we are, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and/or non-binary people also have their own discrete experiences and histories. Our capacity to stay curious and listen to each other’s stories is paramount. Embracing difference – rather than relying on simplistic platitudes like ‘we’re all the same’ – is how we learn to forge respect. In any case, sameness is boring. Sameness is the opposite of diversity. And sameness has never been a prerequisite for queer equality.

  Yes: we’ve chosen to go with ‘queer’ in the title of this anthology. We could’ve called it Growing Up LGBTIQA+. Personally, I don’t mind the unwieldiness of that acronym – I like how it makes us vigilant about who might be left out – but it would’ve made life slightly hellish for booksellers trying to search for it. That said, I acknowledge that there is a sting associated with the word ‘queer’ – especially for those from older generations, against whom ‘queer’ was used as a slur and a weapon. Balanced against that, though, there is also a proud and rich history of defiantly reclaiming the word ‘queer’ for ourselves. LGBTIQA+ people from racial minorities began to identify as ‘queer’ in response to parts of the gay and lesbian community becoming more conservative, assimilationist and palatable. ‘Queer’ is not just an identity, but a lens through which the world can be viewed differently. It’s a noun, an adjective and – perhaps most importantly – a verb. To ‘queer’ something is to subvert, interrogate and flip – which all these stories do in their own way.

  Here, then, are stories about the ways religion forms and deforms us; how our queerness can transform ourselves and the people around us; discoveries of heady romance; fumbly terrible sex and revelatory joyous sex; the vulnerability and physical danger that often comes with being queer in a bigoted world; how friendship can become love; coming out later in life; finding and making families; how queerness intersects with race, language, size, cultural background and ability; the hurt we can inflict on each other; the ecstasies and shocks of finding our community for the first time; about how so little has changed and simultaneously how far we’ve come; and why we need to keep going. Holly Throsby notes in the first story that she remains optimistic. So do I.

  So here you have it: the book I wish I’d had when I was growing up queer in Australia. It’s also the book I want – and invite you – to read now.

  Freedom of Heart

  Holly Throsby

  At the age of eleven I was sitting in my room contemplating whatever it is that young people contemplate. Perhaps the guitar chords to ‘Bad Moon Rising’. I was midway through Year 6, and I don’t know if it’s the same for other kids, but for me it was as if the local pool of people my age had stagnated, basically since kindergarten. I knew the kids at school and the kids from surrounding streets, but I don’t recall making any other friends until I was eleven and a new girl moved to Balmain. Not only was she new, she was very beautiful and spoke with a foreign accent. Sitting in my room that day, having recently met her, I found myself diverted by discomfiting thoughts.

  What were these thoughts? Well, they were really so innocent: I pictured her, thought how pretty she was, and felt a little stirring inside.

  What did this mean? I didn’t really know. I have no idea who first told me what a ‘lesbian’ was, but I guess I must have known what they were, and I’d certainly gathered that being a lesbian was very undesirable, because I distinctly recall wondering with some alarm: Does this mean I’m a lesbian?

  Surely not. Please, no.

  I quickly consoled myself: Silly me! Of course I’m not. Besides, I had been in love with Andrew McDonald since Year 3, and I had kissed Mike Daly behind the toilet block! No, I was perfectly normal and fine. And, mercifully, I did not think of another girl in such a way, nor experience such stirrings, for many years to come.

  Looking back on my childhood, and how Australia was at the time, I’m not surprised that I felt such anxiety. I was born in 1978 and grew up in the Sydney peninsular suburb of Balmain. When I was young, Balmain was home to a politically progressive and somewhat artistic community. The adults I knew were relatively well educated and proudly left-wing. The year I was born, Labor won 84.2 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote in the Balmain electorate.

  And, yet. Even in Balmain. Or maybe because of Balmain?

  Neville Wran did say that ‘Balmain boys don’t cry’ and, sure enough, the men and boys of the peninsula seemed stoic and manly. I assume the most terrifying thing one of those young lads could have possibly been was gay. Everyone in Balmain appeared thoroughly heterosexual. To my young eyes, queer people were invisible. And although my mum worked at the ABC (or the ‘GayBC’ as some have called it) and had dear friends and colleagues who were gay men (so I had heard about those), the true rara avis of my childhood was a queer woman. In fact, throughout primary school I didn’t knowingly meet one. Where were they? I am sure they must have existed, at least over in Leichhardt, but to me they may as well have been the Easter Bunny or a unicorn: not real.

  So on I went to high school, forgetting that uncomfortable thought I’d once had in my bedroom. I began to write songs obsessively, and I had a nice boyfriend for a year and a half – a lifetime when you’re fourteen. I was a tomboy in Doc Martens and corduroy pants. Kids took drugs and smoked cigarettes and had sex. But what about the queer culture? Well, it was this: if a boy at school appeared somehow effeminate, the punishment of taunts and social isolation from other boys was brutal.

  Perhaps as a teenager I was so determined, on a subconscious level, to be ‘normal’ that I suppressed any feelings about girls so deeply as to render them non-existent. This is possible. But the fact was, I didn’t have any queer feelings for almost all of high school. I didn’t have to try not to; I just didn’t. I was entirely focused on boys – until Year 12, when a new girl arrived. Or rather, new girls: several of them, from a nearby school that had closed down. These girls were cool and smart and clearly came from a different planet, because some of them identified as ‘bi’ – a little term that meant so much.

  How intriguing this was for the rest of us in Year 12! Or was it just me? One of the new girls must have sensed my interest and began what I recall as a somewhat ruthless pursuit of my attention/embarrassment. She was so audacious with her flirting! She was so confident and blunt. In fact, one day she yelled at me from across the playground, in front of everyone, a direct sexual proposition. I absolutely died/loved it. I blushed, went home, and sang along to Joni Mitchell: ‘I’m frightened by the devil, and I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid.’

  Now, at this point, anyone who has read my novel Goodwood may be raising an eyebrow. For in the book, the protagonist – Jean Brown – becomes infatuated with a new girl at school who shows her that there is more to this beautiful and sad world than she had previously imagined, and that maybe it’s okay to be who you are. Perhaps those readers are now wondering if Jean’s story is my story, since they do sound rather similar. But: not exactly. When I was writing Goodwood, I wanted to give Jean the kind of confidence I had not possessed at the age of seventeen. I allowed her to be fearless. And even though she hides her feelings from the peo
ple in her life, she is able to act freely.

  So, while I did kiss the girl in high school, I would not say I was free in my heart. It was 1996 then. I had no queer role models to speak of. I had no queer friends or family. There was no The L Word. Ellen hadn’t even come out yet. And although I was beginning to sense that it was slowly becoming more socially acceptable to be a lesbian, it still wasn’t really. There were caveats. As in, it was better if you didn’t actually look like a lesbian; better still if you were merely bisexual; better still again if you were actually straight and only with other women for the entertainment of onlooking men.

  Perhaps this is why, when I met my first girlfriend in the year after high school, I struggled to varying degrees, depending on my surroundings. I loved her, and in our private universe it was wonderful. But back then I was certainly cautious about who I told. I didn’t want to dress in ways that announced queerness, and for that I suffered the judgement of some prouder queers. I was considered, in those circles, ‘not gay enough’, which was confusing. Yet the simplest public display of affection would often incur honks and yells from men in passing cars, and I hated that. So I tried to blend in. I was neither closeted nor courageous. And yet I felt safe and open with close friends; I felt free and alive with other queer people who cared for me and had no expectations about the type of queer that I should be.

  I have known queer people who came out to their parents and were completely excommunicated – literally thrown out of home, as teenagers. I’ve known others who never came out to their parents at all. I’ve known people who left their small hometowns and never returned, for fear of the consequences of their sexuality. I’ve known people who denied their queerness to themselves for most of their lives; or gay people who felt they ‘couldn’t be gay’ because their sister was already gay, and they ‘couldn’t do it to their parents’. I know trans people whose parents still use their deadnames. I know a man whose mother announced to him, moments after he came out to her, that she therefore wanted to commit suicide. I know another man whose mother said nothing to him at all in that moment. He came out to her and she merely turned her head to the front window and said, to no one, ‘Oh look, a little corgi just ran across the lawn.’