Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  I still dream of him sometimes. He is his best self, muscular and lovely. And smoking. Always smoking.

  Three months ago, he sent me a photo. In it he wore tight red briefs and had shaved his body hair. The way the light lingered on his biceps suggested he took time to compose the image, his patient, firm penis an extended olive branch. When Tan messaged, hey mister, I didn’t hit ‘block’.

  I didn’t want Tan to love me, but I let his slick body and pornstar penis flood my messages. I encouraged him. I replied with a wink sticker, or with Wow and Nice. It was intoxicating to hold such power over him, to behold his nakedness, arranged and presented just to please me. But Tan and the memory of my original desire – that coming-into-queerness where everything felt wrong, and exciting – rose like a leviathan and swallowed me. When Chris pushed my legs over my head, I closed my eyes and let Tan pound me. When I descended on Chris, his penis petered in comparison. Sex between my real and phantom lover was desperate – a failed negotiation across time and bodies. Chris noticed. One night, naked and sticky with cum, he asked, ‘You home?’ I tickled him until he begged me to stop.

  Not long ago, as I teetered on the edge of sleep, I received Tan’s final message.

  I’m outside your house.

  I rose from my bed and snuck through the dark house, not daring to turn on any lights in case he really was outside. With heavy breaths, I pressed myself against the crisp glass of my living room window. There, on the street, was a car with the headlights on, purring with anticipation. At the time, I couldn’t fathom how he’d found me – I’d never told him my address. Later, I learnt that Messenger had been attaching an address to each message I’d sent, courtesy of location services.

  In the quiet evening, the muted hum of his car’s engine was astonishing. I wondered if he could see me; if he would get out to cross the distance between us. I don’t know how long I stood there, the warmth of my breath fogging the living-room window. It was a while.

  St Louis

  Oliver Reeson

  When I was twenty-one and had just discovered the possibilities of writing as art, I heard a Harold Brodkey short story called ‘The State of Grace’ on The New Yorker fiction podcast. In it, the narrator recounts his teenage years in St Louis, particularly times spent babysitting a young boy named Edward. The protagonist prides himself on being able to invent games that were ‘wonderful to [Edward] – like his daydreams, in fact’. Yet always, despite Edward’s ferocious, trembling love for him, the narrator holds the boy at a cool distance. It is only later, from the vantage point of adulthood, that he experiences regret. ‘Really, that’s all there is to this story,’ the narrator concludes. ‘The boy I was, the child Edward was. That, and the terrible desire to suddenly turn and run shouting back through the corridors of time, screaming at the boy I was, searching him out and pounding on his chest: Love him, you damn fool, love him.’

  On the podcast, American novelist Richard Ford reads the story and says that Brodkey ‘became a kind of perfectionist, which is a bad thing to be if you’re a novelist, [but] it’s not such a bad thing if you’re a short story writer’. Brodkey’s novel Party of Animals was famously delayed (it took nearly thirty years to be published), and though he was once the talk of New York for his perfect short stories – the great potential, the wunderkind of the city – that wait came to be considered a great sadness. How dare this writer make New Yorkers believe in something and then make them wait for it? His critics spoke of him like he was a grifter, and their impatience with him transferred onto his characters. ‘Brodkey is so fixated upon the tragic memories of his childhood and youth that he has virtually no sense of proportion about them. In one story after another, he offers up pages of gratuitous detail, straining, it seems, to squeeze every last drop of significance out of every last inane particular,’ wrote Bruce Bawer, reviewing the 1988 collection Stories in an Almost Classical Mode.

  Harold Brodkey did not grow up queer in Australia and, depending on your view of queerness and its relation to time and self, one might not even be able to say that he grew up queer in America. He died of AIDS in 1996, and although he contracted the virus from a homosexual relationship he never considered himself a gay man – nor, presumably, a queer man. The narrative Brodkey told of himself was that he was a married heterosexual man whose romantic life was separate to his sexual one. That is – or was – his story to tell.

  I don’t consider myself to have grown up queer in central New South Wales or central Queensland as a child, or Brisbane as a teenager, though these are the places I lived, grew older, fucked in. I began to grow up as a queer person in a doctor’s office in East Brunswick when I was twenty-five, when I cried asking for a referral to a gender therapist. In this moment I admitted for the first time that my disconnect from my body was not – as I had often posited lamely to confused romantic partners – so much to do with the surgery I’d had for breast cancer, or with being asexual, but more with that fuzziness that had persisted since my teenager years. Since I’d stepped out of the seemingly genderless space of childhood and into the heavily gendered body of a teenager going through puberty. I had never spoken about it before, but as I entered adolescence I checked out of my body indefinitely. I told myself that this was what puberty was like for everyone, but over the years it became increasingly obvious that this was not the universal experience I had imagined it was.

  In high school I had no concept that I might be transgender. I thought, for a time, that I might be gay. In Year 8 English we were taken on an excursion to the Roma Street Parkland in Brisbane to see Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. When Olivia tried to seduce Viola (disguised as her brother Sebastian), I felt the melodramatic and engulfing narrowing of my world. I sat in the sunlit amphitheatre in my Catholic school uniform (tartan and large, totally unfit for Queensland weather) and the pubescent voice in my head couldn’t utter anything more than That’s really cool. This feeling never culminated in any real-life crushes, but I still knew that it was the start of something significant, and I remember one night praying to God that I not be gay. I can’t do it, I said. I don’t know how.

  At times since then I have considered myself a dyke, asexual or pansexual. ‘I never really came out,’ I used to tell people proudly. ‘I just started kissing people and never called it anything. My family didn’t care. I’m really lucky.’

  More honestly, I never came out because I didn’t have any words, no story yet, for why what was happening in me didn’t match exactly what was happening in almost everybody else. I would only understand it later in life, as I shuffled through old memories of adolescence. In all of these I have no consciousness of my body. Memories of my youth are of my mind and of a vague feeling of discomfort, like when you don’t get enough sleep and your body feels like something you are merely wearing, like clothing.

  Like Brodkey’s protagonist, having lost my childhood, my most comfortable moments were when I didn’t feel looked at. ‘It was comfortable for me in the back room, alone in the apartment with Edward, because at last I was chief; and not only that, I was not being seen. There was no one there who could see through me, or think of what I should be or how I should behave; and I have always been terrified of what people thought of me, as if what they thought was a hulking creature that would confront me if I should turn a wrong corner.’

  In my early twenties I was unexpectedly diagnosed with breast cancer, and thus was forced to confront the idea of my body: that I had one, that I needed it to live, that it was malleable, and that I belonged to it and it to me. It is only now, as I move into the later part of my twenties, that I am growing up. I have started testosterone therapy and I feel, suddenly, like the teenager I never was. It is as if my physical self is coming into focus, and not just when I look in the mirror. It’s as though my mind is one image and my body another, and they are circling ever closer to one another, closer to something unified and clear.

  I have a crush on someone, in the dizzying, disorienting sense, for probably
the second time in my life, and I have no idea what to do with it. The other night she asked me about the ways in which I feel like I’m going through puberty. I told her I had always found people beautiful but now I find them hot. I find myself wanting to touch their skin or kiss their shoulders. When we talk, my voice breaks when I laugh too loudly or talk too fast, and she laughs at me and asks me why I hate it happening. I say I don’t know. I do like the way it signals my growing up, but I feel residual discomfort with the notion of being noticeable.

  Mostly, I feel lucky and grateful to be alive in a time when I get to claim who I am, when I can realise something was missing from my life that I deserved to experience and can correct it. Although I am correcting it, I think often of the missed opportunities. The incorrect explanations for myself I held for some time. Were they lies, even though I had no concept of the truth? Should I have realised earlier? What if I had had top surgery as a teenager? Would I have developed breast cancer in the residual breast tissue? Or would I have escaped something I never should have had in the first place? Sometimes I want to run back through those corridors of time and pound on someone’s chest – but whose? Not the child version of me, who felt genderless and therefore comfortable; not me as a distant and confused teen. No one is at fault, yet the urge to turn and run back towards myself remains.

  I have come to view all identity as a sort of constant growing up, a perpetual becoming, a continued reinvention. Our concepts of identity, the categories we use to understand it, are after all simply stories: powerful and important, but not above questioning. To approach them with an expectation of perfection is to stall us, stop the motion of becoming and therefore halt the identity and let it evaporate completely.

  I wonder if Brodkey’s perfectionism was connected to his choice not to identify as queer. There are countless other factors, of course – he lived in a different time. But the feeling of being adrift, isolated, because you don’t have the language to articulate your life perfectly, pervades so much of his work that it gives me pause. It is both heartbreaking and deeply familiar to me.

  I want to tell people all the time: there is no deadline for growing up, no submission date for your life’s narrative. You can work it out now or later. You can reveal yourself in parts, or as a whole, and make revisions. For better or worse, sooner or later, life conspires to reveal you to yourself, and this is growing up.

  Harold Brodkey was a writer with a highly American, masculine intellect. His success, the pressure for him to deliver, the notion that he was gifted – I recognise these as stressful at the same time as I criticise the effortlessness with which they were afforded to him. There were other geniuses at the time, non-male, who could not keep people waiting so long, not piss off their audience so deeply, and still be allowed to publish. As someone who is critical of masculinity and its easy topple into toxicity, I am self-conscious about relating to his work. I relate to it not because I understand the experience of being a man or a teenage boy in America, or because I wish to have been one, but because I recognise someone who couldn’t allow themselves to be seen and didn’t know why until later in life.

  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?

  Ahead of the release of Brodkey’s second novel, Profane Friendship, a gay love story released three years after his first novel and two years before his death, Ian Parker wrote: ‘Some people publish a novel, are saddened or pleased by its reception, then go on holiday, then write another, have children, write another. Life goes on. But imagine a writer who did not do that. Imagine just one novel; imagine its publication and reception expanding to fill a lifetime; imagine a vast, ridiculous, exhausting palaver going on for twenty-five years – great advances, sneak previews, mistaken newspaper reports of this novel’s arrival. Think what this does to your understanding of a normal relationship between writer and reader, between writer and writer, your idea of reputation.’

  You can’t choose to opt out. If you don’t tell the story, others will fill in the gaps for you. Brodkey’s story is sad because of its undercurrent of persistent repression. It speaks to me of a heteronormative world that understood and validated his talents but would never allow him the narrative devices his own life needed. Of course, I am projecting – our lives barely overlapped; I can’t claim true insight.

  ‘There is a certain shade of red brick – a dark, almost melodious red, sombre and riddled with blue – that is my childhood in St Louis. Not the real childhood, but the false one that extends from the dawning of consciousness until the day that one leaves home for college. That one shade of red brick and green foliage is St Louis in the summer (the winter is just a gray sky and a crowded school bus and the wet footprints on the brown linoleum floor at school), and that brick and a pale sky is spring. It’s also loneliness and the queer, self-pitying wonder that children whose families are having catastrophes feel.’

  In the opening of ‘State of Grace’, Brodkey talks of the red brick of St Louis as his childhood and I think of the red brick of the first home I remember living in, in Muswellbrook, New South Wales, where I was born. I wonder if it is the same shade. Instead of being laced with blue, I remember it as being highlighted by the pale orange of the cumquat trees either side of our front door. I recall my childhood in that home not as sombre, but as sharp and free, as running naked in the yard and playing with my brothers and learning to hold their guinea pigs and rabbits and wrestling with their friends. I remember the Christmas when I asked my family to call me Peter because Chloe had gone on holiday with her real family (Some mix-up! Can’t remember the details) and my family went along with it, or at least indulged me for as long as I needed this. Perhaps my memories of those bricks are gentler because my childhood there did not stretch, as it did for the narrator of Brodkey’s story, until I left for college but, instead, until my dad’s job moved us on, as it did every few years. In high school, there are brick buildings once again, a dark red, definitely tinged with blue this time. I went to a Catholic high school, and it’s here where Brodkey’s sombreness really hits me. My memories of this time are fuzzy with blue, smeared with it.

  I don’t believe, necessarily, that people are born queer, or that I was born trans. That is not my experience or story. I think I was born free from anything and then stories accumulated on me and some of them turned out to be incorrect. I made my own attempts to write convincing stories too: asking to be called Peter; mistaking the queerness of Shakespeare as relevant to my sexuality rather than my gender (the story I could use to understand my response at the time versus the story I can use to understand it now). None of these stories was objectively true, then or now, but the more I learnt the more I had at my disposal to understand myself. All identities, queer or not, are fictional stories. The importance of queer storytellers is not in how they prove their truth, but in how they prove it is necessary to tell our stories in a way that makes us comfortable.

  For queer people, adolescence often stretches beyond the teenage years. I think of familiar queer aesthetics – delicate-featured trans men, butch dykes in patterned bow ties, hairless twinks. Most of my queer friends, in their twenties, live life with the fervent excitement of delayed adolescence, of ascending to yourself long after puberty has passed; of needing to regress to progress, to go back to your adolescence in order to grow up, telling the story correctly this time.

  I have two older brothers and although my mum longed for a daughter, she was so certain that I would be a boy that when I emerged into the world and was handed to her, she looked up at my father and said, ‘Robbie, what’s wrong with his penis?’ He looked down at her and replied, quietly, ‘Kim, it’s a girl.’

  In queerness, growing up isn’t confined to childhood. The gift of being qu
eer is in the close contact it gives you with the nature of identity, the great many possibilities for becoming and for telling stories. Queerness is the red brick – that heavy, strong thing that reflects the light we see around it.

  Boobs, Rags and Judy Blume

  Phoebe Hart

  ‘When will I get my boobs?’

  I was eleven years old, and ever since I’d finished Judy Blume’s seminal work, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, I was in our kitchen moaning to Mum on a daily basis about my glaring lack of mammary glands (Ms Blume has a lot to answer for).

  Mum made no comment, just shifted her weight slightly on her feet and continued standing at the sink with her back to me. I sighed and resolved to return to my bedroom to do some more breast-enhancing exercises. ‘I must, I must, I must increase my bust . . .’

  I’m not sure how this technique was supposed to work, but I hoped it would – and soon! My gaggle of girls (I had dubbed us ‘The Gang’ so we sounded tougher than we actually were) was due to arrive in a few hours for a weekend get-together at my place and I was still as disappointingly flat as the proverbial surfboard. There were seven of us, and I’d worked hard to make these friends after swapping schools a year earlier, in Grade 6. I watched with envy as they all got their ‘marbles’, which gradually developed into well-formed little breasts. I only had fleabites where two nice little mounds should be.

  I would try to fool my mates by popping down the front of my top some dried up balls of ‘Slime in a Bucket’, horrid kids’ gunk sourced from a showbag I got at the local agricultural show in Townsville in Far North Queensland. That got old when my snotgreen goo boobs slipped out of place, or worse, fell out and onto the floor.