Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  *

  It crept up on me so subtly that I didn’t even notice until it had burrowed into my bones. At first there I was, a certified Man Lover Who Would Never Ever Look at a Girl Are You Kidding, and then I was questioning, and then I was standing before myself, fully formed, bi as fuck.

  It felt exciting, like being born again, or at least like being a snake bursting out of its old skin, revealing something that was always there. I wanted to shout it to the world, but before that, I had to shout it to my parents – at the time I was writing a column for a national newspaper and I knew it would come up in my work eventually, and I wanted them to hear it from the horse’s bisexual mouth.

  I dialled the ten digits of my parents’ landline, hands clammy, throat closed. When my mother picked up, it all spilled out at once: ‘Ihavesomethingreallyimportanttotellyou.’

  ‘Did you have an abortion?’ she asked, panic in her voice.

  ‘What? No,’ I said, bemused. Apparently that’s the line – who knew?

  ‘Well, whatever it is is fine, then,’ she said.

  I can’t even remember how the rest of the conversation went, because it was that unremarkable, which is remarkable in itself. My mother once told me that raising children in a new country had been a constant lesson for her – that she became more open-minded and compassionate as she watched us go through adolescence. Somehow, through all of the fear, we had arrived at a place of understanding, and I realised I probably could have told her, told myself, about my sexuality years earlier.

  My parents are still a little mystified by the concept of bisexuality, and I still have to correct them any time they ask me if I have a boyfriend yet (no, but I also don’t have a girlfriend, or a non-binary-friend – please, I am very lonely, stop asking). But they’re getting there.

  When my cousin married the love of his life and we watched them sing ‘Love Me Tender’ together with an acoustic guitar (extremely cute), my once unapologetically homophobic father muttered gruffly, ‘This is surprisingly nice.’ Years later, when the marriage equality postal survey was underway, he urged all of the patients who came into his medical practice to vote ‘Yes’. We are getting there together (even though my dad still bristles when he walks past my sister watching RuPaul’s Drag Race – it’s a work in progress).

  *

  I have never slept with a woman.

  Sometimes I feel like I don’t know how to be bisexual, as if there’s a proper way. As if someone would doubt a person’s heterosexuality if they were a virgin; as if there’s any milestone I have to reach before I’m allowed to carry the card. Even though my family is accepting, it still scares me. I’m still censoring myself, wondering how much I should allow.

  But I am unlearning.

  I am unlearning the self-loathing, the doubt, the pressure, the terror, the worry of being at once too much and not enough.

  I have figured out that, just like me, the path to knowing myself is not straight (sorry). I am thirty years old and I am only just figuring it out – how to let go of the fear of the unknown, and dive headfirst into a world that I’ve always dreamt of fully inhabiting. To be more like Cô Linh and Cô Trang – the role models I didn’t even know I had, who defied their conservative culture to be themselves, proud and unafraid, with a love that continues to pulse decades on.

  To Jessica. To Buffy. To all the girls who’ve made my heart flip before I brushed the feeling away.

  I can be both.

  Rob, and Queer Family

  Nayuka Gorrie

  I was reticent about my sexuality until I was about twelve or thirteen. I didn’t really start living an out queer life until a few years ago. And I still feel like I’m growing up – or at least growing into – queerness. There was no Young M.A, Janelle Monáe, IAMDDB, Kehlani or Amandla Stenberg when I was a kid. All I had was t.A.T.u., and they turned out to be gammin. But there were signs I was going to grow up queer: my crushes on the two youngest Hanson brothers, and liking softball. I didn’t know it at the time though; I just existed.

  I might not have understood exactly who I was yet, but I knew being queer was bad. Ankle socks were for poofters according to my grandfather. AFL was ‘GAYFL’ according to the Queensland boys I grew up with. Rugby League was for poofs according to my Victorian uncles. It was Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. If you annoyed a sibling, you’d be called a fag. You heard about a cousin who was ‘a bit thing’. About an aunty who had a ‘good friend’ and a motorbike. There was a black person who everyone made jokes about because they were visibly queer. These jokes travelled up and down Queensland’s coast and apparently black kids are still telling them today.

  There were queers in my family, of course, but typically they removed themselves. There was never outright rejection, just whispers and insinuations. I don’t blame them for separating themselves from the extended family – us queers have to protect ourselves. But for black people (and maybe I’m projecting here) this is a kind of death, a part of the soul cauterised to protect the rest.

  Aside from the whispers and taunts, the other thing that shaped my understanding of deviance was how straight everything was. All the things deemed ‘normal’ and all the ‘done things’ were straight. Straightness was a given. Every girl I knew grew up, found a man, got pregnant, and stayed with him even if he was violent or they were unhappy, bored or hated each other. Pink was for girls, blue for boys. My mum always worked, but for most other women their place was in the house. Toxic masculinity, heteronormativity and rigid gender roles were enforced and performed under the cloaks of culture, the-way-things-are and religion. This wasn’t done in a self-reflective way; there were just no examples of other ways things could be.

  There were glimmers of hope though. Dad loved Queen, and he said it didn’t matter that Freddie Mercury was gay, because he made good music. When Mum joined the police, she suddenly had a lot of dyke mates. And the sexual rigidity we grew up with eased when Dad left Mum.

  I wasn’t aware of it as a child, but Dad was Catholic and quite strict about what we were exposed to. We were instructed to cover our eyes during ‘naughty’ scenes while Dad fast-forwarded.

  When he left, Mum started dating, and eventually she met Rob. Rob was the brother of a man she was sleeping with. Rob was my first encounter of the queer kind.

  There are so many ways to be gay or queer, but with Rob there were a lot of obvious signs and most of them revolved around Beyoncé. We spent many a summer day and night watching DVDs of Destiny’s Child and solo Beyoncé shows, and the film Fighting Temptations, starring Beyoncé. He even used ‘Beyoncé’ as his middle name on his Facebook profile. Despite all this, I didn’t realise that Rob was gay. I thought he was just a very lovely man with excellent taste.

  I missed these sorts of clues when I was young. But now that I’m older, I realise that queerness was there: it was just coded. Sure, there was no Jayden declaring Tyler his boyfriend, but Tupac and Missy Elliott had an extremely queer aesthetic. Despite being drawn to that, and to Rob – to all this queer coding – I didn’t clock it at the time.

  The first time I identified what my sexuality was, I landed on labelling myself ‘bisexual’. For years, I was closeted about being bi. A friend lent me a porn magazine, which I kept under my bed. I was out to friends, I pashed at parties and fucked during sleepovers, but my romances were always with boys and men. These relationships were serious; pashes with girls and gays at parties were not. But once I was in a relationship, it felt unfulfilling. After the freshness wore off, I would get bored. It wasn’t the fault of the men I was with: there was nothing wrong with them.

  I spent my early twenties with a man, and for most of that time I had to stave off queerness. It was all closeted: gay porn, what I read and who I followed, and who I had crushes on. While I was with this man, I came out to Mum and other family members who didn’t yet know. Mum couldn’t understand why I bothered to tell her I was bi – I was in a relationship with a man, so why did it matter? She didn’t understand
that I wanted to be seen and to live truthfully. At various points in the relationship, I alternated between thinking I was a lesbian and thinking I was asexual. The two obviously aren’t mutually exclusive, but I thought something had to account for the way I felt. I regularly wondered if I wasn’t a woman. I often didn’t feel like a woman.

  Eventually I realised I could no longer be with this man. After the relationship ended, I was really able to be queer. I fucked often and soon realised I was not asexual, I just wasn’t into men, or wasn’t interested in being a woman with a man. I hated the dynamic and found it distressing. Heterosexual men are conditioned to think they are tops, and because heteronormative society is conditioned with binary thinking, heterosexual woman are expected to be bottoms, which starts to become rather boring if you aren’t truly either.

  Towards the end of this relationship I started to dress how I wanted to dress and began going to parties to be around people who it made sense to be around. After I left the relationship, I realised these people were all super queer. The cousins I felt most drawn to were gay, the parties I was going to were all queer – everything finally made sense. Unknowingly, I had gravitated towards the life I wanted.

  Queer dating for the first time was difficult for a few reasons. Women who are into everyone but have not unpacked their shit can tend to situate men at the top of the hierarchy. There can be a tendency to generally take (colonial white) masculinity more seriously. This isn’t clear-cut, obviously. As Allison Gallagher has pointed out, cis people expect trans women to express a kind of femininity they can feel comfortable with – feminine but not too feminine. In the LGBTIQA+ hierarchy, women and femininity, particularly trans women, are at the bottom. I’m probably theorising here to make the waters of my own behaviour murky. Desire and who we prioritise is political, and regretfully I have treated a few women like shit. To be fair, I treated men like shit too. Something we don’t necessarily talk about is that it can be much easier to treat men like they are disposable. Or, at least, I did, because I just stopped caring about them. The problem with respecting people who aren’t men a lot more than you respect men, and not learning how to respectfully engage with hook-up culture is that it can be hard to just fuck people who aren’t cis men. It also doesn’t help that even if you do just want to fuck, some queers can be really coy. White queers can be really fucking weird. I was utterly turned off random hook-ups with people who weren’t men when one white person I hooked up with at a party randomly rocked up to my house drunk at 3 am on a Friday night over a month after we’d hooked up. At least with men there seemed to be a mutual disrespect – no one expected to see each other again. It was easy to get just sex from men, even if it was uneventful, even if they never made me cum (they never did).

  Eventually I realised I was an all-or-nothing person. I either just wanted sex, or I wanted a life (and sex!) with someone. There was no in between.

  Eventually I met Witt, who is now my boyfriend, and realised all the things I wanted were possible. I could be passionate about someone and it could stay passionate. It was possible to cum a lot. It was possible to wake up happy and excited. Things just made sense.

  I am fortunate to come from a family that has not only produced a lot of queers but also respects my relationship and my choices. Mum doesn’t see my queerness or gender as some kind of personal or moral failure – mine or her own. She uses the right pronouns. I have a brother who often gets mistaken for being queer because all his friends and siblings are queer and he’s always at our parties. I have a queer lesbian sister.

  I am lucky to be in my late twenties in the late 2010s: I did not face ostracisation. But many queer people still do. I see many an Instagram story about loneliness, rejection, homophobia and transphobia. Despite it being ‘20bi-teen’ or ‘20dyke-teen’, depending on who you ask, it is still not always safe to be whoever you are. I’m one of the lucky ones.

  Those of us who are lucky – who have never known cold rejection, police brutality or violence from bigoted strangers – should remember that this time in history didn’t arise spontaneously. Without women like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, we would not have our movements. The queer black position in Melbourne, where I live, would not be as strong as it is is if not for Lisa Bellear and organisations such as OutBlack. I’m lucky to live in a city where it feels like black queers are everywhere.

  I often wonder if baby Nayuka would be stoked with older Nayuka. I think I’m living the kind of life I would have loved to have seen, even just from a distance. Although I probably wouldn’t have clocked what it really was.

  *

  Until I started writing this essay, I had never reflected on how important queer people are to keeping families functioning. Our family was crumbling when Rob found us. Dad had taken off and Mum was trying to navigate her emotions, single parenthood and reclaiming her youth. Rob, our beautiful fairy godmother, stepped in.

  At the tail end of 2004, my sister Likarri, brother Paul and I all contracted chickenpox at the same time. Mum wasn’t able to take time off work, so Rob did. While I found my own body revolting, he tenderly applied calamine lotion to my skin and Likarri’s. When he decided that we were well enough to leave the house, he drove us to Rebel Sports in Mt Gravatt. Unable to control themselves, people unabashedly stared at pock-marked Likarri and me. Rob, offended on our behalf, asked anyone who dared to stare, ‘What the fuck are you lookin’ at?’

  A year later, Rob took Paul, Likarri and I to Dreamworld. He was so much fun. If he liked a ride, we’d do it three more times. I’ll remember his scream and laugh going around the Claw forever.

  One teacher–parent interview night, Mum got hammered on passionfruit UDLs. I was upset because I’d started to make an effort at school and wanted Mum to know how well I was going. She called Rob and he made the twenty-minute drive from Oxley to Indooroopilly State High School to make sure I could have this moment and to save Mum and I an argument.

  The following year, unsatisfied with the dress I’d bought myself for my Year 12 formal, Rob insisted I buy a different dress. I didn’t have the money for it, so Rob asked his boyfriend at the time to help me out. I got special permission from the school to have Rob as my formal partner. We laughed all night.

  The day I started writing this piece I messaged Rob and asked him if I could talk about him for this anthology. He said, ‘Of course, make me famous!’

  Around two weeks later, he was stabbed to death in his Kelvin Grove house.

  At his funeral they played ‘I Was Here’ and ‘All the Single Ladies’, and when his casket was lowered a substantial piece of my heart was buried with him. He probably has several hundred chunks of heart down there with him.

  Words can’t capture Rob’s smile, laugh, smell or humour, but I hope in some way that as this book gathers dust his memory is kept alive and that I have in some way fulfilled the last request Rob ever made of me: make me famous.

  I would not be the queer I am without Rob and I will miss him forever.

  Caritas

  Jack Kirne

  His name was Stephen. Nobody called him that, of course. He went by his surname, Tan. We attended St Paul’s together. A Catholic boys’ school in the suburbs, it was a dangerous place to be gay. Had I been the type to make a fuss, I would not have allowed myself to be enrolled there.

  Tan was thin, with a long neck; dirty black hair flicked over the collar of his blazer, in blatant defiance of the school’s dress code. When he smiled, which he did often, crooked teeth jutted out in strange directions; with his mouth closed, his lips were full and slightly feminine. When tasked with reading the daily prayer, he would deliberately fuck it up. For instance, if the prayer read, ‘Lord, give us victory over sin and temptation’, he said, ‘Lord, give us victory, sin, and temptation’. If it read, ‘Lead me to the towering rock of your safety’, he said, ‘Lead me to the towering cock of your safety.’ Not very clever jokes, but when the slightest infraction tempted detention, these risks commanded roaring
waves of laughter. He wanted people to pay attention to him. My cock swelled if he spoke to me, which he did rarely, thank God. Sometimes, it became too much and I would retreat to the toilets, where I’d knock one out.

  Of course, nothing would come of it. I read space opera and spent my weekends building landscapes for my model trains. I dreamt of being a jazz pianist, and hung out with the music kids, an eclectic bunch of misfits who talked exclusively about Coltrane, Led Zeppelin and The Legend of Zelda. Tan was different. At lunch, he hung with a crew of boys who lingered at the top of the grassy hill that overlooked the school’s soccer oval and the old gym. They slipped down to Merri Creek to smoke, and if they were bored, they’d find a Year 7, and, like cats playing with a half-dead bird, shove him around until it got old. Those boys were sometimes close, pulling each other into rough side hugs, or ruffling another’s hair. In class, they would play gay chicken beneath their desks, where an adventurous hand sliding up a thigh was a test – swerve too soon and you were a pussy, but let the hand climb too far and you were something much worse: a homosexual.

  *

  Once a month, our year level was dragged into the school’s chapel and exposed to Father Peter’s sermons. He was an ancient man, with excretions that leaked constantly from the folds of his eyes. He wanted to make us ‘gentle men’, and spoke at length on the value of Christian caritas, and loving one’s brother. These ideas provided ample fuel for the simmering gay panic. Tan called Father Peter a super-pedo for his speech at the school’s fortieth anniversary assembly, in which he fondly recalled watching the ‘fine boys’ shower together. The thought depressed me. Tan and I were in PE together, and in the changerooms, he and the other boys would clutch their towels around their tight waists to hide their peckers. How I longed for the freer days. But I never said any of this; I barely said anything at all. When I spoke, my voice moved with lovely accordion motion; unchecked, my slight hands would nurse my face in an effeminate way. In Year 7, I had been called homo a few times, and had since mastered the art of not being seen. In silence was a rough kind of safety.