by Benjamin Law
I’d never been certain I would have further surgery. I made the decision to wait for three years – the approximate time for maximum breast growth – before considering breast augmentation. With hormone therapy I had achieved a B cup, which appeared small on my large frame. So, in May 2017 I had 500cc implants and now I am a full D cup. To attain what I hoped would be a totally new body shape, I had a tummy tuck in October 2017. Hormones can sometimes change the distribution of body fat to a curvier figure, but I needed a little assistance. Diet and exercise helped to reshape my body. My waist slimmed and my hips and buttocks increased. Looking in the mirror, I could see a much more feminine silhouette. I had achieved what I believed might be impossible.
I’m often asked: do I have any regrets? Of course not. I have two beautiful children and three gorgeous grandchildren. I’ve travelled and I’ve had a fantastic life. I will still have ups and downs as a woman, but I’m far better equipped to deal with the challenges. I can enjoy the future, being true to myself.
All my life I have wanted to dance, but for so long it remained only a dream. How could I explain that I wanted the woman’s part in partner dances? Now I learn West Coast Swing. I’m led around the floor by an experienced male partner – and I love it.
The Most Natural of Things
Justine Hyde
In the mid-’80s, we move to a new housing estate in the outer western suburbs of Sydney. I live there with my single mother. It is treeless. All the birds are gone. Everything organic has been bulldozed to make way for dead-end cul-de-sacs, brick veneer houses and concrete driveways. The wasted earth offers up broken remnants of construction in place of the green shoots of life. It looks like a post-war battlefield where mines lie buried beneath the surface.
In summer, the heat bakes down, magnifying the absence of green and making me wilt. In winter, the morning fog hangs heavy for hours. The cold slaps me as I open the front door. Frost creeps a silver veil across the ruins. When it rains, the razed ground turns to clay mud that sticks to my shoes in thick red drifts. I scrape it off against the gutter.
Year on year, the suburb spreads its tentacles, until it crowds out the horizon and I can no longer see past it.
I lift the metal drain cover and drop my bike down into the dark. I ride through the smooth, subterranean concrete tunnels and emerge in a distant street. The houses here are still half-built. I pick through heaped building refuse and fill my pockets with splintered wood and sharp metal. I slip abandoned fluorescent light tubes from their cardboard covers and hurl them against the ground, watching them smash apart. I rescue an abandoned litter of feral kittens. They mew with open, pink mouths and shred my arms with needle-sharp claws.
There is one bus to school in the morning and one home in the afternoon. There is a boy who likes to sit behind me on the bus and bang my forehead against the metal seat frame. The mission kids sit at the back and smoke. You hand over your lunch money when they ask for it. If I miss the bus, I walk the five kilometres home through semi-rural backstreets. The thick smell of shit from the pig farm. Roads eerily empty of cars and people. A few vacant-looking malevolent houses, their yards littered with burnt-out car chassis and rusted whitegoods. One day I stop to inspect a bulging garbage bag by the side of the road. The skewed hind legs of a dog stick out through the plastic.
At school, I hang around in the library to dodge Maths and Sport. The two-level utilitarian building is a place of air conditioning and possibility. I discover Steinbeck, Wilde, Camus, Poe, Shelley and McCullers. I write stories on a typewriter. I fail Maths. I help to care for the indoor pot plants. I stare at the ghostly white axolotl that sits lonely at the bottom of the library’s fish tank and wonder what it is thinking.
*
One lunchtime in the schoolyard, I accidently grab a handful of my friend D’s breast. Her eyes flash wide and we stand looking at each other, stunned. We both laugh nervously.
‘Sorry,’ I say, but I’m not.
Something shifts in my brain. I think about girls’ breasts often after that. I wonder if this is normal.
*
My English teacher has perfect skin and an Edinburgh accent that makes my nerve endings spark. It is her first year of teaching. She stares me down in class if I misbehave. I start smoking in the toilets at lunchtime when she is on yard duty, hoping she will catch me.
‘Justine!’ she says, her voice a hard edge.
I want her to push me into the cubicle, lock the door and fuck me up against the wall. She gives me detention instead.
*
I have never heard the word ‘queer’. I have heard these words: ‘gay’, ‘poofta’, ‘faggot’, ‘homo’, ‘lezzo’, ‘dyke’. They are used to cut people: words shouted from car windows, words scrawled in spray paint. No one I know is queer. They must all live in the city, gathered by the coastline like shorebirds; winged creatures.
*
I rattle through the bathroom medicine cabinet and search through my mother’s drawers. I line up all the pills I can find. There are blue tablets, white tablets, big tablets, small tablets, capsules filled with white powder and others filled with tiny orange beads. I swallow them in handfuls, choking them down with water. I hear the background rise and fall of voices on the television in the living room. I lie down on my bed, close my eyes and summon a never-ending sleep.
I am gutted to wake up.
‘You’re too young to feel depressed,’ my mother says.
My friend S tries to swallow bleach by putting a funnel down her throat. When that fails, we drink vodka mixed with orange juice and spew all over her granny flat. We set fire to the backyard with a pile of newspapers. We go into Kings Cross and score acid from her cousin at a club called Ziggurat. S has her P-plates. She drives us around and it is raining, a Sydney summer deluge. Neither of us remembers about windscreen wipers or petrol. Her dad, a tough Italian bloke who doesn’t say much, rescues us. Years later, I run into S in a dyke pub with her girlfriend. We drink beer and play pool and reminisce.
There is another girl in my grade, A. She has hollowed out eyes, is too thin. And there is a camp boy, C. He has long eyelashes and is only friends with the girls. I find out about them through the grapevine years later. There must have been others too.
It is New Year’s Eve and I’m at a house party. I am sixteen. I want to lose my virginity, just to get it over with. I search out a good-looking guy who is in the grade below mine. His girlfriend is away for the summer holidays. We fuck in his backyard, sharp blades of grass pressing into my bare arse, until we realise the neighbour is watching. Then we move inside to his parents’ waterbed.
‘I can’t be your boyfriend,’ he says.
‘That’s fine,’ I say.
When we finish, I notice something brown and liquid smeared on my arm.
‘Did you do that?’ I ask.
‘No,’ he says.
I see a small, white terrier on the end of the bed, looking at me with sad eyes.
‘Dog vomit,’ I say, wiping my arm clean on the bedsheets. I get dressed, find my friends and leave.
*
On the weekends, I catch the train into the city with my friends, A and M. We wander the markets of Paddington and Glebe, and buy vintage clothes, incense and cheap silver jewellery from women with dreadlocks, piercings and tattoos. We see arthouse movies at the Valhalla. Eat at cafes on Oxford Street. In these suburbs, men hold hands with men and women hold hands with women, unselfconsciously. I watch them for clues on how to be.
On Saturday nights we go to a Goth club in Kings Cross that plays dark tunes and goes heavy on the smoke machine. The boys are dolled up with eyeliner, nail polish and velvet jackets. The girls push up their cleavage with corsets; their tangled hair drapes their shoulders in pre-Raphaelite drama. Everyone is loved up on E; pupils and bodies yawn wide open. When the sun comes up, I sleep on a stained mattress on the floor of a sharehouse, curled up next to one of the pretty boys. His eyes are black-smudged and a puddle of saliva rings his
pillow.
*
I answer an ad in the classifieds. I meet X. She is older than me, works in finance and drives a sports car. She picks me up from the train station in the city, takes me out for dinner and drops me off in time for the last train home. I don’t call her back.
Next I meet E. We see movies and trawl bookshops. I sleep over at her parent’s place and we stay awake to watch the sun rise over the beach. We work up the courage to go to our first lesbian bar. At first, the male bouncer will not let E in because she has long hair and looks too straight. We plead with him.
‘Okay, in you go, girls,’ he says, winking.
The bar is full of women. Lots of short hair and leather. Thumping techno and sweaty bodies pressed against each other on the dancefloor. It feels like finally being let in on a secret. The air is charged; I feel electric. I am too scared to kiss E.
*
There are many times when I inch towards a confession to my mother. Somehow she always has a sense of what is coming.
‘Lesbians are disgusting. I can’t even imagine what they do in bed,’ she says.
I can imagine. I can imagine touching the delicate skin between a woman’s thighs and sliding my tongue across her swollen clit and pushing my fingers deep inside her, wetter and tighter as I make her come and . . . and . . .
Another time, my mother hangs up from a phone call and says, ‘Aunty P’s best friend J – who is married with children – has just found out that she is a lesbian!’
‘Did she get a letter from the government?’ I ask.
The continual effort of hiding myself in plain sight is an incremental act of erasure.
*
I move into a sharehouse in the city. I get a job in a law firm photocopying contracts and making sure the lawyers have enough pens and staples. It is all marble foyers and harbour views and contemporary art and people who grew up in fancy suburbs and went to the best schools and won prizes at university. The partners have minibars in their offices and play golf. There are waiters to make coffee and Friday night drinks are fully catered and people do coke in the toilets at the office Christmas party. It is full of queers in expensive suits.
I meet V. She is a graduate lawyer, a bit older than me. She is not out to anyone, but I suspect her.
We start hanging out, we have lunch at work, and that turns into weeknight drinks, and that turns into weekend things. I tell her I like girls but I don’t let on that I have never even kissed one.
She lends me Woolf and Sackville-West and Winterson. She buys me gifts made of rare stones pulled from the earth and beautiful objects shaped from glittering metal and she writes me notes on exquisite paper that tremble in my hands when I read them.
One drunken night after office drinks, we stumble along the fringe of the Botanic Gardens. The dark limbs of Moreton Bay figs arch over us, rustling with fruit bats. We sit on a ledge of sandstone that holds the warmth of the day’s sun. We look out over the city lights glinting off the surface of the water. V takes my hand and closes it between hers. Time bends and my head swims with alcohol and desire. My pores spring sweat, my blood surges and my heart bursts through my ribcage.
‘Do you want me to kiss you?’ she asks.
As our mouths connect, I think of all the sea creatures swimming in the harbour, breathing flagrantly through their gills as if it is the most natural of things.
Binary School
Roz Bellamy
I’m fifteen years old and I’m in love with numerous people at my Jewish high school.
One is a girl in my prayer group. In the mornings, the boys and girls are split into different rooms for Shacharit, the morning prayers. In the boys’ room, they recite a blessing that ends with the line ‘Shelo asani isha’, meaning ‘Blessed are you, God, that you did not make me a woman.’ In the girls’ room, we substitute that line for ‘She-asani Kirtzono’, meaning ‘Blessed are you, God, that you made me according to your will.’
The girl I like doesn’t fit the mould, and anyone who doesn’t fit in at my school fascinates me. All of us, the misfits, are different in some way. She is smart and cynical, which I admire. There is much to be cynical about, which very few of my classmates seem to recognise.
My sister and I have trauma in our DNA that stems from anti-Semitism, Nazism and the Holocaust, like many others at the school – but ours is different.
My mother’s parents had to flee from their home town of Odessa, Ukraine, when it was occupied by Nazi Germany and their Romanian allies. During the Holocaust in Odessa, Jewish people faced kidnappings, imprisonment, mass shootings, death marches, ghettos, starvation, concentration camps, forced labour and torture.
My grandmother and her family were starving, eating frozen earth when they could find nothing else. Decades later, after migrating to Australia, my mother’s family added an ‘e’ to the end of their surname. They wanted to assimilate and, to do so, needed to sound less foreign.
My father’s parents were British Jews who faced rations and bombing raids. My grandfather joined the British army to fight Hitler, after changing his name from Cohen to Bellamy in case he was captured by the Germans.
At Sydney airport my mother and her family had the word ‘stateless’ stamped on their arrival cards. My father and his family arrived as ‘Ten Pound Poms’ on a ship, by choice. It’s a complex mix to have in your DNA: those who were forced to give up their citizenship in search of safety and those who chose to leave. Another binary alongside those I encountered at school.
As children, when we learnt about Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, the girls in my class played the role of Ima, mother, lighting the candles, preparing the food and nurturing the family, while the boys played Abba, father, reciting Kiddush, the blessings. At twelve, I had chosen to reject the Orthodox model of a bat mitzvah and instead followed the model of a bar mitzvah that boys have at age thirteen. This was acceptable at my family’s progressive and egalitarian synagogue, but was considered unusual at my Orthodox school, where a bat mitzvah for a girl involved reading a speech, tucked away in the separate women’s section.
Following my bar mitzvah, I continue to struggle with these rigid binaries. To me they are unequal, even while I have been raised in a religion and a community where they are seen as natural and are enforced constantly.
*
I don’t say anything to the girl in my prayer group. I write her name in my diary and then cross it out. I do not ever write about what the crushes on girls might mean.
My school doesn’t talk about homosexuality, apart from some kids using the terms ‘homo’, ‘dyke’, ‘fag’ and ‘lezzie’ out of the teachers’ earshot. I learnt to keep my attraction to girls a secret years earlier, when I came out to myself in my diary without even realising it.
The first sign that something was up was when I stuck both the Mulder and Scully stickers from TV Hits in my diary. I was ten years old and found both actors incredibly sexy.
At fifteen, I am more aware of my sexuality, even though I don’t know the words to use. I watch The X-Files with my father, discussing extraterrestrial life and conspiracy theories, but keeping the other new, strange – dare I say ‘alien’ – world to myself.
We learn about sex in PE and Health. This is a particularly cruel turn of events for someone who already finds PE teachers terrifying. In Health, we are taught an abstinence-focussed curriculum with no mention of sexual or gender diversity. Nothing in the classes is useful to me, including the biological information and an awkward session about condom use, which I have already learnt from Judy Blume books.
Books are a respite from a world that is otherwise quite lonely. I pick up a young adult novel at my local library and discover that it is about two girls falling in love. Reading it, I am wide-eyed with disbelief and I feel a growing sense of longing. I don’t know what ‘gay’ looks like, apart from a few outdated stereotypes on TV, but the book helps me start to figure it out.
A year later, I watch the TV broadcast of the Sydney Gay
and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. I love the fierce Dykes on Bikes, the spectacular drag queens and the roar of the supportive crowd. I turn it to the lowest volume level, fearful at the prospect of being caught. Not that my parents have an issue with the parade, but being caught watching it alone might reveal something.
It is the ’90s before TV has any queer characters that grab my interest, before the internet is suddenly available as a private agony aunt, and I am on my own.
One day, my parents take me and my sister to see the musical RENT. I am riveted by the confident and feisty bisexual character, Maureen. I barely know the word ‘bisexual’, apart from when the word ‘bi’ gets dropped around the playground, accompanied by a sneer. When Maureen sings to Joanne, ‘Ever since puberty, everybody stares at me! Boys, girls, I can’t help it baby,’ my heartbeat quickens. Not because boys and girls notice me, but because I notice them.
In Year 11 my school participates in a community ball. We do a certain number of community service hours and then we are rewarded with a party. My best friend and I decide to do the community service without attending the ball. Our official stance is that we shouldn’t need a bribe to do community service. My personal reasons are more complex: I don’t date, being too confused, shy and unconfident for that.
One of my close male friends calls me in the lead up to the ball.
‘Um, hey,’ he says, ‘I was wondering if you want to go to the ball together.’
I don’t know how to respond. It is the first time someone has asked me out. After an awkward pause, I remember my official stance about the ball.
‘I’m not going to the dance,’ I reply, and tell him that my friend and I are boycotting it. ‘We’re going to stay home and watch Buffy.’
‘Oh, okay,’ he says, sounding embarrassed. ‘No problem.’
I stay home but, even during the magic of Buffy-watching, I wonder if I should have gone.
In Year 12 I am preoccupied with my studies but spend a significant part of the year with crushes on males and females. I only tell my best friend about my heterosexual crushes. When I mention one of the boys I am most attracted to, she scoffs. ‘He’s so boring!’ she says. ‘And he’s dumb.’ We have never seen eye to eye on boys. Whenever I swoon over video clips of Taylor Hanson, she says, ‘but he looks like a girl!’
