Growing Up Queer in Australia
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I have not suffered like this. I have been far more fortunate and enjoyed a large degree of privilege. But I have certainly struggled against the sheer force of societal expectations and judgement. As queer people, we feel this. Navigating our lives can seem like a constant task of ‘reading the room’. Will I be judged? Will I be safe? It is like this – to varying degrees, at various times – for all of us.
So the way I see it now, my life as a queer person has been a slow process of feeling more and more at ease. I had some nice affairs with men, but always fleetingly. By the time I met my second long-term girlfriend, when I was about twenty-six, I had come to accept that being in a relationship with a woman was natural for me. The circle of people I shared my queerness with became larger over time – until finally it included anyone who was listening. Some people may be surprised to hear that I ever lacked fortitude, for I have acted with such brazen confidence! Walt Whitman taught me that we all contain multitudes. I realised I didn’t need to be confused about my sometime-attraction to men, but that it could merely exist as a part of who I am. I came to prefer the term ‘queer’ because for me it means anything that’s not straight, and I am certainly not straight. I have slowly found, over a long period of time, freedom of heart. And I have come to believe that the simple act of being validated by other human beings is perhaps the most important and helpful gift there is.
I have a partner now, of seven years, and we have a young daughter and a geriatric Labrador. We have a gay donor, and he and his partner are such a positive force in our lives. We have a lovely community of LBGTIQA+ friends, rainbow families, and so many dear allies, and we make an effort to find our daughter books that show different types of families, so she sees herself represented, and hopefully feels as normal as any other kid. As much as some straight people would like to believe it, marriage equality did not change Australia overnight. There is still a long way to go, especially for our young ones. But I have seen so much change in my short life – in others, in society, in myself. I feel quietly optimistic.
Shame and Forgiveness
David Marr
I was fourteen, standing on the deck of the ferry wearing a snazzy pair of white pants as it chugged across Port Hacking towards Camp Howard. What I couldn’t admit to myself then is what I most vividly remember now: the erotic charge in the air. It was frightening and compelling. That week of messing about in the bush, swimming in deserted bays, sleeping out and listening to the Word was suffused with the promise of sex. Nothing happened but a lot happened. Some of it was ludicrous. One night in the dining hall we were given a sex education lecture. The slides weren’t of men and women, but chooks. I remember still a cross-section of tubes and eggs and awkward talk of reproduction as that hen glowed on the screen. Afterwards over cocoa – here’s the point – a serious, handsome young man spoke intimately to a dozen or so of us about committing ourselves to Christ. I was deeply drawn to the idea of a man who could love me knowing all my faults, indeed who could love me for my faults, even for the worst of them. One day I would need to be saved, but Judgement Day seemed a long way off in 1961. On that night and at that moment I needed to fall in love, and here was this counsellor – a radio sports commentator in later life – telling me there was a man available: Christ. By a miracle that seemed obvious then, Christ would satisfy me and cure me and protect me from the worst fears I held for myself. I didn’t have the courage to come forward over cocoa. Two did. I piked. But as I walked back to the tent I shared with half a dozen other boys on the edge of the bush, it struck me that I had committed myself at that moment to Christ. The future would be different now: pure, thrilling and safe.
The school chaplain had already been pursuing my soul for years, hammering on about sin and salvation. Three times a week we assembled in the chapel to be taught the only lesson Anglican schools in Sydney teach thoroughly: the need for all us awful human beings to be Forgiven. I wasn’t convinced. There didn’t seem anything worth forgiving, until sex came along. Uneasiness at thirteen was turning to shame at fourteen. This was the raw material I took across the water to Camp Howard. I couldn’t have been the only one. We were there to be recruited and the counsellors knew what they were doing, setting us free in that stretch of bush and talking sin at the same time. They challenged us to take Christ into our hearts, but that first required deep acknowledgement of shame. First shame and then forgiveness. That’s their business.
You don’t have to be a young queer for this to work. There’s a trace of self-disgust in most of us that can be worked up into shame, especially in those most difficult, precious years when we are on the threshold of sex. But a young homosexual is particularly easy pickings, fearful of himself, his family and the disapproval of his world. Christ offers a gay kid consummation of a kind, strength to resist sin, the minor heroics of teenage self-sacrifice, and a chance – important for children living day-to-day with an undertow of shame – to do good. That was the Christ I took into my life at the age of fourteen. It was a kind of falling in love, tepid compared with the real thing when that came along, but it was love nevertheless. What followed were a dozen wasted and painful years. I wasn’t very brave. My circumstances weren’t desperate and I got out the other side with most of myself intact. But it’s left me unable to forgive those Christians who are still at work, inflicting misery on kids.
Where does shame come from? I look back to my childhood and can’t remember anything being said. My parents had no idea what was happening. Children like me were bred in other suburbs to other families. Homosexuality was a vice too dark for the Anglican Church to condemn. All I heard from the pulpit were grim hints. I vaguely knew the Crimes Act promised a decade or so in the slammer and once in a while the afternoon papers had appalling stories of citizens caught in lavatories. The only instruction my school ever gave me came when I was seventeen and the senior year was in the assembly hall for a talk by the school doctor. It wasn’t much of an advance on cross-sections of chooks. ‘You can tell a homosexual,’ Dr Day said, and by my calculation about a dozen boys must, like me, have frozen with curiosity and terror. ‘You can tell them by the decor of their flats.’
Though this advice has not been entirely useless . . . Silence was the most potent source of shame in my childhood. Preachers like Fred Nile claim Christians have the right to keep their children ‘wrapped in cotton wool’, and they campaign for the state to collaborate in that. For years I used to scoff at the pointlessness of trying to keep the young innocent in this way. My answer to the Fred Niles was that, try as they might, our subversive bodies will always tell us the truth. But I was missing the point. What censorship is really designed to achieve is the sort of silence that turns what our bodies tell us into shame. This calls for more than censorship of books and films. It also needs the censorship of learning. Those many Christians who still oppose sex education use the rhetoric of intimacy, innocence and faith. What they’re fundamentally about is cultivating shame.
If the clergy I met while I was a keen young Christian had been a more inspiring lot, I might have joined them. I was a shame-driven kid hungry for a spiritual life but all I heard were Sydney Anglicans hammering out their formula for salvation. Even so, I thought a lot about joining the church in the year or so after Camp Howard. My reasons were muddled, but strong in the confusion was a sense that the church might be somewhere to shelter while I set myself right. It would be a respected response to my troubles. A cover and cure. But I knew so little of what service to a church might mean; all I saw was a prospect of Anglican boredom for the rest of my life. My vocation was stillborn.
Talking to priests and ex-priests, trying to puzzle out why men commit their lives to religion, I heard over and again the familiar note of gay shame. Often it was deeply hidden or entirely disguised at the time it was doing its work. At first glance it seems an incongruous way of dealing with vilification, to join the church of the vilifiers. But that’s the beauty of shame. It drives you inwards towards the pain because somewh
ere in there is also the promise of relief. The churches offer pain and shame, but provide the mechanism of forgiveness and relief. Catholicism differs from other churches only in offering guilty young men the supreme reassurance of celibacy. For those who fear their sexuality, that vow of abstinence for life looms like a bulwark against temptation.
At some point after Camp Howard I made a solemn pact that by the time I left school for university I would stop feeling this way. I devised a number of spiritual exercises to make certain. These included prayer, daily Bible reading, eating, staying clear of the beach and not letting thoughts of men come into my mind when I wanked. Keeping a blank mind while masturbating seemed a significant moral achievement. There was one image I had trouble keeping out: Johnny M. diving into a creek at cadet camp. His body hung in the air for a moment, naked and beautiful, before it hit the water. That split-second has lasted forever, of course, but back then I thought I could lock it away with all my other troubles and contradictions, each in their separate cell. I suppose the idea was to turn myself into a prison, a sort of Pentridge for inappropriate emotions, then throw away the key and walk into university a free man.
I invested a decade of my life in the pursuit of a profound, sincere, determined and hopeless ambition not to be homosexual. It’s an ordinary story with an ordinary ending. Christ failed me. So did alcohol. So did marriage. Whatever damage I did to myself along the way, I did worse to others I loved. Eventually the price of heaven proved too high and in my late twenties, with all these wasted years on my conscience, I set about doing what I might have done in my teens but for that problematic encounter with Christ over hot cocoa – I began to try to live as myself.
From The High Price of Heaven, 1999
How to be Both
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
Cô Linh and Cô Trang had been together ever since I could remember. They were friends of my parents, and I’d see them at gatherings where we sat in backyards at long white plastic tables – at least one for the adults and one for the kids – eating bánh cuốn and chaả giò. They weren’t any different to the other grown-ups, not really – they’d all known each other forever, and they’d sit at the adult table talking about things we found dreadfully boring as we chased one another on the grass and collapsed into laughing heaps, out of breath.
But of course they were different, because they were together and they were both women. They had delineated roles, though: Cô Trang was soft and feminine, with colourful scarves, bright pink blush, perfectly pouted lips and permed hair that looked like she’d styled it on a cloud. Cô Linh, on the other hand, had short hair like mine. She always wore pants, button-up shirts and an unimpressed expression. There was no doubt about who was the man and who was the woman in this two-woman couple.
Behind closed doors, we called Cô Linh ‘Chú Linh’, chú being the Vietnamese word for uncle. We all did it – my parents, my sisters and me. We’d laugh but we weren’t being mean; we didn’t hate them. We still hung out with them, didn’t we? It was just a joke between family members. It was alright.
*
When I was growing up in the sleepy suburbs, bisexuality was a foreign concept. Either you liked girls or you liked boys – and if you were a girl, you shouldn’t like girls. When my sisters and I played The Game of Life and reached the stage where our little movers would get married, inevitably someone would put a pink mover next to another pink mover, and we would laugh and laugh. Such a silly thing to even think about – a girl marrying a girl. Such a good joke.
If we heard about a man who had left his family to be with another man, we would gasp theatrically: imagine finding out your husband had been gay the whole time! What if you were the one who turned him? The shame! He was always pretending. He never wanted to be with you. He only wanted to be with another man.
When I was six, I heard the word ‘lesbian’ for the first time, when my older sister spat it venomously at me as we brushed our teeth. I didn’t know what it meant, but by the hatred in her voice, and the way our father’s face darkened as he yelled at her to never say that to me again, I knew she’d used a bad word.
When I was nine or ten, we were watching SBS when a beautiful man appeared onscreen, draped in red, make-up accentuating his delicate features. I was transfixed, but my reverie was broken by my father’s snarling voice: poofter. I should have known better; it was unnatural. I didn’t think about the beautiful man again.
When I was sixteen, I told my mother that I was a lesbian (I wasn’t) just to see how she’d react. She burst into tears at the kitchen sink. I remember thinking that even if I did discover in the future that I was a lesbian, I could never tell her.
We spoke in hushed tones about my cousin in America and his husband, my other cousin who lived just a few suburbs away and his new boyfriend. I had seen Cô Linh and Cô Trang all my life, so I knew that kind of relationship existed, but we didn’t talk about the truth of it. They were just friends who were always together and lived in the same house and slept in the same bed. Roommates. Definitely not two consenting adults in a loving relationship that had stood the test of time for almost as long as my parents’ had.
You were one or you were the other. You could not be both.
*
When I was ten, I got a scholarship to an Anglican private girls’ school – my family was Buddhist, but we lived in Sydney’s bible belt and all the ‘good’ schools around there were religious. Off I went to this strange new world where we got detentions if we wore ribbons that weren’t the regulation blue, or dared to step out into the world wearing anything but our school blazer.
Here was a place where we were told outright that it was a sin to be gay (ironically by a female staff member who, despite informing me I was going to hell for not being Christian, would hand me gifts after class with a little knowing wink, giving me preferential treatment that I only recognised as inappropriate later on). There was an unspoken rule forbidding teachers who were gay from discussing their personal relationships. Whispers shot across the schoolyard about the girls rumoured to be lesbians – how disgusting and creepy. When the time came to get changed for PE, we didn’t want those girls around in case they checked us out. We were told that no one was to take a girl to the school formal.
It was during my time in this peculiar place that I met her. I was in the orchestra for a school production of South Pacific, and Jessica, a new exchange student a few years older than me, was one of the leads. Her wild, Hermione Granger–esque hair swept over her soulful brown eyes, and she had the most intoxicating smile. I don’t remember the first time we met, or how she got to know my name, but every time I saw her my heart would jump into my throat and I wasn’t sure why.
‘Hi Giselle!’ she’d say brightly, and I’d stammer a hello back before running away. We never said more than that, but somehow it meant everything.
I moved through that year like I was in a daze. I had my first boyfriend, if you could call him that – someone I exchanged timid confessions of love with over the phone and on MSN, and met in person just once before he dumped me and I felt the crush of heartbreak for the first time. But Jessica was a physical presence. I’d walk the corridors hoping I’d run into her, although I couldn’t quite say why. I thought she was so cool, this older, confident girl – I wanted to be like her, just like I wanted to be like Sarah Michelle Gellar, who I had a poster of on my wall that I loved to look at, staring into her paper eyes, drunk on the feeling of it. I told myself it was because I liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’d never watched the show.
Jessica left at the end of the year, moving back to the island she called home. One day she was there, and the next day she wasn’t. I never got to say goodbye or tell her how I felt – not that I’d recognise it myself for years.
Life went on without her, as it tends to do. I wonder where she is now – if she’s with someone, if that someone is a woman, or if I’m just projecting. I wonder what I’d say to her if I saw her again. Thank you, maybe.
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br /> Could my love for Jessica coexist with my love for that first boy who broke my heart? Was there a part of me that I had buried somewhere so deep, so secret, that I couldn’t find it?
One or the other. Never both.
*
Switching my Tinder to both men and women was an experiment, that’s all. I was in my late twenties, a couple of years out of a five-year relationship, and had well and truly played the field with men, but now – especially living in Melbourne with more diverse friends than I’d ever had before – it seemed like anything was possible. I still didn’t consider myself to be anything but straight, even though new friends I’d meet would invite me to queer events, always surprised when I adamantly corrected them.
I chatted for months with the first girl I went out with before we ever met up. Something was holding me back, but as I scrolled through her photos I wondered what it would be like to wake up next to her.
Our first date was pizza in the park with her dog; our second was a movie night at my apartment where I cooked vegan mac ’n’ cheese and we watched The Swan Princess, which both of us had loved during childhood. I felt comfortable with her in a way I never had with men, but it also felt strongly platonic. Although with men I always knew who I was attracted to, with women the lines seemed more blurred because I wanted to be besties with all of them. We became extremely close friends, but sexually, romantically, not so much as a kiss ever transpired between us.
But I fantasised, still: what would it be like to touch a body more like mine, curves and dimples rather than strong, hard lines? The moans, the sighs, the softness. I wanted to be soft. I wanted to play a new part.
Somehow, though, whenever I pictured my future, it was the same as it ever was. I could see myself in bed with women, learning to make each other’s bodies sing, but when it came to romantic relationships, I still only ever saw myself with a man. Only after a lot of soul-searching did I come to recognise this as a symptom of internalised homophobia. As I talked to more women on Tinder, dated and slept with non-binary people, I realised that I wasn’t straight at all, and yet I still felt pressured to force my romantic life into a binary, to conform to what I’d always been told was acceptable. I could be soft behind closed doors, perform a role I’d never known before, but in public, in a relationship, I still had to seem like I was straight. No matter how hard I tried to fight, I couldn’t shake it.