Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  During the first year of uni two close male friends come out. One is the friend who invited me to the community ball. It turns out that he had wanted me there as his beard. When I find this out, I wish I had agreed. How cool would that have been? Two questioning teens being beards for each other at a Jewish community dance.

  I don’t tell my gay friends about my sexuality. Being romantically and sexually attracted to men makes me decide against it. Maybe I will end up with a guy, I think. Nobody needs to know about my big gay feelings.

  I feel fortunate to pass as cisgender and heterosexual, even if I’m isolated and unhappy.

  I start going to gay clubs and bars on Oxford Street with my friends. They assume I am there for fun, like the other women in our group, who put on dresses and heels and join them for a night out free of unwanted male attention.

  I dance, nod appreciatively when they point out various men they are pursuing, and drink. I notice butch and androgynous women or gender diverse people with short hair, piercings and tattoos, who move around the room with a confidence I can’t imagine possessing. Sometimes we make eye contact from afar – mine tentative, theirs flirty and bold – but I am too afraid to approach. I settle for being complimented by a drag queen. ‘You’re dancing in such high heels,’ she says. ‘Bless your heart!’

  The only time I feel I can explore my attraction to women is on my own, not at the clubs with my friends. University offers anonymity and freedom, but I’m unable to do much more than walk past the queer space or fantasise about the Scandinavian exchange students.

  I’m not concerned about being attracted to people of all genders. It feels like a naughty secret. I walk the hallways propelled by a rush of hormones and adrenaline; I am attracted to a ridiculous number of people. I don’t feel the need to talk to friends about it, or label it.

  *

  Only years later do I realise that gender is irrelevant to my attractions, because sexuality and gender are not binaries for me, and I do not fit into binaries. I am sexually attracted to people, not to the specific and sometimes arbitrary categories we classify them with. Not to one type of genitalia. Not to a particular ratio of sex hormones. Gender may or may not have anything to do with sexual attraction for me.

  My own gender varies depending on the day, my mood, my hormones, my feelings. Sometimes I am male or female, sometimes I am both, and sometimes I am neither. Sometimes what I am is undefinable, but when I first hear the words ‘genderqueer’ and ‘gender non-binary’, I feel a sense of peace. They fit. They make me feel less alone.

  I talk to my parents about gender. I discover that if I had been assigned male at birth my name would have been Richard. Dick. I find this quite funny and hard to comprehend at first, but later, I am perplexed. What would Dick’s life have been like at my school? If the kids were so nasty to me – that a little, closeted, cis-appearing girl – what would they have done to him? They likened my curly hair to pubes, so what would have happened to Dick? Would he still be here?

  *

  A lot has changed since the ’90s. I’m out and proud, and publish writing in which I am vocal about identifying as queer, bisexual and non-binary. I am married to a woman, Rachel, and have overshared in the public domain about her and our marriage.

  If I want to understand more about my family history, I can choose when I wish to learn about the trauma that took place in my family over multiple generations, rather than being tested on pogroms and concentration camps as though they are algebra or spelling.

  If I want to explore my faith, I can do so without being restricted by gender or sexuality, like I was constantly at school. I don’t have to thank God for anything if I don’t want to.

  It’s my choice if I want to say ‘Baruch Hashem’, or ‘Blessed is our God’, for making me queer and non-binary, because now I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Why I’ve Stopped Coming Out to My Mum

  Vivian Quynh Pham

  ‘Liz thought you were the one.’

  Maureen had just told me her daughter, Liz, had died. Liz was upstairs in her bedroom, my feet were stuck in the kitchen. I fought back sobs as Maureen said that Liz bragged about me while delirious from palliative care, that she was so proud of who I was.

  I gave Maureen a pink box that I had made for Liz. It was the reason I had visited the house that day. I had no idea Liz was gone. Inside the pink box were my hand-made paper gardenias, flowers that thrived in coffee grounds representing Liz’s love for coffee. The box was pink so that Liz would say, ‘What’s wrong with you, Viv? I hate pink!’

  This vanished reaction ran through my head as I drove home, wailing.

  That evening was the first time I came out to my parents. I had to explain to them that I would be away, dealing with my grief because my girlfriend had died, but there isn’t really a word in Vietnamese for girl-that-is-my-romantic-partner, so I used the literal translation of girl-friend: bạn gái.

  ‘So, this is a friend that you love dearly?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘Okay.’

  *

  My Vietnamese parents wanted me to fit into white Australia. I was named Vivian, after Julia Roberts’ character in Pretty Woman. A hooker with a heart of gold. Head and heart in the right place, but wrong position in space and time.

  Growing up, depression robbed my vision of colour. Even while dreaming, I couldn’t make out the colours of the world. I didn’t see a psychologist (what Vietnamese parent would allow that?), so this is all retrospective self-diagnosis, but colour and mood have always been linked for me, and when I was young the world was grey.

  What coloured my world in was fiction and sports and girls. The first two were acceptable, the third was not. Homosexuality had been illegal in New South Wales until 1983, and for a Catholic child it may as well have still been.

  By fifteen, I had become a textbook, first-generation academic overachiever. I gave up on fiction and sports and girls, and tried to ‘pray away the gay’. I would be a doctor, I would be straight, I would be acceptable to both white Australia and my Vietnamese parents. My world turned grey again.

  By sixteen, well, I can’t remember sixteen. I know from what I’ve been told that I tried to commit suicide a few times. But by the end of that year, I had reconciled my relationship with god with my sexuality. Which meant that I stopped praying and started to see a counsellor. I become every Asian stereotype you can think of. Instead of dealing with my sexuality via religious shame, I distracted myself from it by staying busy. I was musical, academic, a leader in my high school – a long list of high-achievement things rather than ‘that Gay Asian’.

  *

  Liz made it impossible to remain in this state of distraction.

  We first met at Galentine’s Day, a Parks and Recreation–inspired annual celebration of female solidarity held by Liz’s cousin. I didn’t have a type before Liz, but Liz was my type: tall, blonde, ambivert, drama-seeker, nosy, eloquent, articulate, bold. I saw so many colours. Most of all, gold.

  Despite being inspired by her fierce feminism (at a time when feminist ideals hadn’t quite diffused into Australia), I daydreamed about being her housewife – an urge I had never felt before, or since. I wanted to back this brilliant woman as she conquered the world, to become a power couple in black cocktail dresses staring down the patriarchy with middle fingers raised.

  I first kissed Liz in the club while the rest of the group danced. She kissed back. The hetero attention was ruining our moment, so we walked along the beach back to her car, where Liz told me about her cancer remission.

  ‘You are not your disease.’

  I later discovered that this drunken but heartfelt response was the moment Liz decided that I was extraordinary. I didn’t see her as a ‘cancer survivor’, I just saw Liz: strong, golden Liz. (That she continued to feel this way despite me throwing up moments later is a testament to her generosity.)

  I also later discovered that she was re-diagnosed the next day. She never told me,
so our future remained colourful in my mind right up to the moment I delivered the pink box. According to the blog she was keeping, her scans showed that she ‘lit up like a Christmas tree’.

  *

  The second time I came out to my mum, I was on my way to visit Liz. She’s at Scarborough Cemetery, a few rows from my maternal grandmother.

  ‘You are going to see your friend?’

  ‘She’s actually my girlfriend.’

  Movies and TV don’t much show what it’s like coming out to a non-white mum. There was no sympathy or an ‘everything is going to be okay’ moment. There was shock, confusion and denial.

  Shock was standing in the kitchen and telling your daughter everything you can think of to erase her queer identity.

  ‘No, you’re not.’ ‘You’re young, you don’t even know what this means.’ ‘It’s just a phase.’ ‘I liked my female friends too. Maybe you like them too.’ ‘You just haven’t found the right man.’

  Confusion was saying the words ‘you’re not gay’.

  Pê-đê is the Vietnamese word for gay. Like the French word pede, it is also derogatory slang, closer to the word ‘tranny’. My arsenal of queer theory, which in English allowed me to argue fiercely against such words (channelling my inner-Liz), didn’t exist in Vietnamese. There was no shared cultural narrative for being gay and Vietnamese, no celebrities that had been embraced by the straight mainstream, nothing I could lean on for sympathy or understanding.

  I rejected pê-đê and told her I just liked people for who they were, in the hope it would provide my mother with some kind of a concept of her daughter that wasn’t derogatory slang – something that didn’t mean that she had failed me.

  As for denial, that was how she chose to cope. I should have left it there.

  When I told my friends, who were white, what had happened, the cultural barrier between us became obvious. They encouraged me to try again. They insisted. ‘Your parents will accept you, of course they will.’ ‘It’s their duty to love you.’ ‘She just needs time.’ ‘Next time they will understand’. No. Next time was even worse.

  *

  By the time I was with Liz, my psychologist had helped me understand the relationship between my mood and my perception of colour.

  Liz looked bronze as she hopped the fence to the mountain trail, which I wouldn’t have had the guts to tackle at night if I wasn’t with her. Bronze is a colour I associate with fearlessness, and she made me feel bronze too as we began our hike, torches in hand, a bubble of bravery in the darkness.

  In classic Liz fashion, the only hint she gave me about where we were going was ‘wear comfortable shoes’. I became suspicious as she drove us up the mountain, a drive she said she sometimes took when she needed to think. I imagine she drove there a lot during her first round of cancer – a habit I inherited.

  At the top was a view over the city, its lights rippling against the black backdrop of the South Pacific Ocean. The oil rigs on the horizon looked like they were floating on the clouds. Liz brought chocolate and a picnic mat for us to enjoy the view. We kissed with the city behind us.

  This sumptuous moment under the moon became so embedded in my memory that I would know the location of the mountain no matter where I was.

  Only on our way back to the car did she tell me that she hadn’t been sure she would be up for the mountain trail at night. The same way she had given me bronze bravery, I had given it to her. On the drive home she mentioned we would be able to spend more time together as her graduate job had given her time off. In reality she had quit to undergo treatment.

  *

  The last time I came out to my mum, I wish her only reaction was denial.

  Coming out seems to be the foundational gay rite of passage. It’s supposed to be a punctuation of your life, an empowering political act, a personal duty to your gay forebears who didn’t enjoy the privileges of a queer-friendly place and time. And so, as a young queer adult, it was imperative for me to come out in all areas of my life. Or so it seemed. Back then, I had never considered an alternative to the linear journey. It seemed like there was only one path, from ‘closet’ to ‘out’, and I was delaying the inevitable.

  In 1997, Sears and Williams wrote that one-on-one contact is the single most effective way to change homophobic attitudes. And it works. Media representation is on the rise, and prejudice against LGBTIQA+ individuals is on the decline. However, Sears and Williams also said that ‘many tenured full professors who are gay or lesbian continue to cower cowardly in the closet’. This image resonated with me. This idea that the closet is a space of suffering, shame and failure. If I didn’t come out of it to my parents, it would mean that I was ashamed. No one ever said this to me, but it’s what I had absorbed, and the recent legalisation of same-sex marriage had inspired me to be the best queer person I could be. I would ‘come out’ to my mother, love would conquer all, and I would never have to return to the closet again. I would be stronger for challenging her closed-mindedness, and she would be opened up to a rich new queer culture.

  Wouldn’t that be what Liz wanted of me? To be a strong, confident, bronze, queer person – like her?

  But this white, Western LGBTIQA+ discourse didn’t anticipate the reaction of a Catholic Vietnamese woman. It didn’t anticipate that, for some minorities, the closet might be the better place to be. That the closet is a safe space, a tactical move, and even a powerful, fluid space for some. That the imposing of Western queer values on a person whose non-white culture left them unprepared for the coming-out ritual can cause pain rather than liberation.

  The night I came out to my mother for the third time, she wanted to kill herself. The next day, so did I.

  *

  My next date with Liz was at a friend’s party. Liz couldn’t drive so I offered to take us out to dinner at her favourite Mediterranean restaurant before heading to the party. Afterwards, we went to a cocktail bar and I showed her how to salsa. Her friends pulled me aside and drunkenly told me that they’ve never seen her so happy. That was also our last date. It didn’t feel like it. There were no goodbyes.

  But our relationship didn’t end with her death. I had lent Liz Why I Write by George Orwell. After she died, I retrieved it from her bedside table. It was filled with underlinings, paperclip bookmarks (she knew I hated dog-earring books) and angry feminist book graffiti.

  ‘Woe is me George.’ ‘Who does this man think he is?’ ‘Get off your high horse, George!’

  Her defiant defacing of the literary canon is one of the many times she showed me – in life and after – that I don’t have to accept what people say, whether they’re hallowed white male authors or allies in the queer discourse.

  I put this principle into action daily. From responding to cat-callers, disagreeing with classmates in tutorials, or opening discussions with soccer teammates at the pub.

  ‘I think that who you end up with determines your sexuality.’ Cue me opening a discussion on romantic, sexual and gender spectrums. ‘We don’t need feminism anymore’. Well, let me introduce you to intersectional feminism and modern toxic masculinity. ‘I’m all for equality, but like, I’m not a feminist’. So, you examine and repair people’s dental crowns, but refuse to call yourself a dentist?

  ‘You should be ashamed for not coming out in all aspects of your life,’ I told myself. But what right did cultural expectations, or anyone else, have to determine what would make me happy? After all, one of the things Liz loved about me is how I am unapologetically Vivian.

  I’ve decided to never come out to my mum again.

  Professor Mary Lou Rasmussen at the Australian National University writes that ‘when coming out discourses are privileged, the act of not coming out may be read as an abdication of responsibility, or the act of somebody who is disempowered or somehow ashamed of their inherent gayness.’ Today, I am selectively ‘out’ to certain people and some situations – and I am not ashamed. The flexibility of the queer closet has allowed me to build a stronger relations
hip with my mother. We’re currently a hemisphere apart, but she calls me every weekend. She still questions my antidepressant prescriptions, and she did vote ‘No’ on the postal survey, but I love her dearly.

  When I forgot to buy ingredients for dinner, she would cook for me or buy my groceries, knowing I was low on money. When I was stuck at university in the cold rain, with all my gear, she would drive to pick me up. When I had tonsillitis, she let me sleep in the same bed as her while I sweated and shivered through the nights. I know she loves me.

  Developing my ethnic identity means maintaining this loving relationship with my mother. I’m out to my father (a Buddhist) and my two brothers, while never telling my extended family.

  Developing my queer identity means being involved in queer literature, in political conversations, and making queer discourse accessible to everyone.

  Developing my personal identity only requires remembering Liz.

  I’ve never regretted our time together. Sometimes I wish I’d had the chance to say goodbye, but I know you wanted me to remember you with a full head of hair – to remember you gold. Thank you for being vulnerable with me. I know how hard that was for you. Thank you for not letting me go when treatment was getting rough. Thank you, Elizabeth, for reminding me, every day, how to be bronze.

  Training to Be Me

  Cindy Zhou

  i. In preparation for gruelling physical activity, one should practise the movements needed for the journey ahead.

  Every Monday after school, for two hours or so, I would stay behind for rowing practice. It was winter, and we weren’t at the point of wearing spandex yet. Those months were purely for training ‘off-water’ – rotations on the three ergometers on the mezzanine above the school gym. I studied the theory, the anatomy of a stroke: catch, extraction, drive, recovery and settle. Rowing is about coordination and focus, trust and teamwork. It builds resilience and it would make me strong.