by Benjamin Law
So, I have actually cut my hair and it doesn’t look half bad. I’ve decided, though, that leather doesn’t really suit me. I’m okay with being a quiet lesbian. Of course, I get that lump in my throat sometimes still, but the difference is that my bluebird is out of its cage and it’s singing. It’s telling me: it’s alright, you’re okay. It’s going to be okay.
vi. Settle. Lowering the stroke rate, but maintaining the pressure.
The Watering Hole
Samuel Leighton-Dore
Some of my earliest recollections of sexuality took place by a swimming pool, the air thick with the smell of chlorine as my peers and I undressed behind loosely held beach towels. Changing rooms, full of swinging willies and naked butts, provoked a fresh sense of anxiety and excitement – an indication of things to come as I edged cautiously towards puberty.
I experienced my first erection while lining up for a waterslide at the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre. With bare bodies pressed into a long, shivering procession, I reached the front of the queue only to have an instructor (well, the pimply seventeen-year-old who mumbled ‘go’) point at the misshapen lump growing in my speedos and laugh.
‘Holy shit, he’s got a stiffy!’ he shouted. ‘Gross!’
A wicked chorus of laughter followed me as I leapt feet-first down the winding blue tunnel, flipping and cracking my face against the hard plastic walls, before disappearing into the churning waters below. Mortified, I held my breath and swam as far from the waterslide’s gaping exit as possible, resurfacing several metres away – covered in blood, forever changed and, truth be told, still a little hard.
The young man’s laughter rang out in my head. The word ‘gross’ stung like salted hot chips on my split bottom lip. I hadn’t noticed any girls in line, only boys, standing shoulder to shoulder, teeth chattering as drops of water ran slowly down their backs. Boys, their nipples hard and shrunken, skin prickled with goosebumps.
Boys, I thought. Gross . . .
One of several psychological repercussions from that day was that I convinced myself erections were my body’s way of expressing disgust. Whenever I saw something ‘gross’, such as an older male student walking topless and sweaty across the school cricket pitch, my dick would awaken and gently nudge my inner thigh to warn me. This made sense, I reasoned. It was a survival mechanism, albeit a highly visible and inconvenient one.
The alternative – that I was attracted to boys and slowly developing into a gay adult man – was far more daunting.
Unfortunately, my theory was soon disproven. During a lunchtime discussion with classmates about seeing family members naked, I exclaimed that the sight of my mother in the shower ‘gave me a stiffy’. The group erupted into giggles, and it became sorely apparent that my use of the word ‘stiffy’ had, in fact, been incorrect – and that perhaps the pool instructor had been right all along.
Perhaps my body was trying to tell me something.
Despite the early warning signs, over the following years swimming pools remained the backdrop to my sexual development. Growing up in the inner western suburbs of Sydney, the local public pool was my first and only point of contact with semi-naked human bodies that were not my own. Long afternoons spent at the pool were filed away: sun-bleached, flesh-toned collages to be revisited late at night, shrouded in the secrecy of bedsheets, pillow pushed to my groin.
While these memories were undoubtedly tinted by my slow sexual awakening, they meant much more to me than that. Throughout summer, I always looked forward to Saturday morning trips to the pool: retrieving loose hairbands and twenty-cent coins from the tiled floor of the deep end, ducking between crowded lap lanes and spending my allocated two dollars at the canteen. Ears popping, bloated bellies, patterned towels and long stretches of hot concrete: these are only some of the visceral memories I look back on fondly.
Hitting puberty, the annual school swimming carnival came to resemble a low-rent, increasingly horny debutante ball. Category: swimwear. For me, the carnival was an opportunity for boys (and girls, I guess) from all year groups to gather, undress, slip into tight scraps of navy fabric and compete against one another (as well as gay, I’ve always been a little competitive). They were also an opportunity to manoeuvre a solid minute-long perv at Lucas Bobbin’s chest or accidentally brush up against Harry Shield’s bum on my way to the loo – where the full-length changing-room mirrors were angled just right to catch a glimpse of older guys spraying piss into the long, teal-tiled urinals.
Pubescent triumphs aside, swimming pools also set the stage for numerous very steep, very public learning curves. At my Year 6 swimming carnival, I delivered my first Valentine’s Day card. I gave it to a blonde girl named Kelly after watching her win the U13 medley in a black one-piece. It was all very Cameron Diaz in Charlie’s Angels, I thought. She was fabulous – and I was relieved. Was I actually attracted to a girl? Propelled by an unrelenting sense of denial, had I stumbled blind and desperate into the shallow waters of heterosexuality?
Spoiler alert: I had not.
Standing before what felt like a stadium of eagle-eyed spectators, Kelly chuckled, tilted her head to the side in a way that felt patronising, and informed me that she’d already agreed to be another boy’s valentine. I overheard a passer-by whisper my name and laugh as I walked, dejected, back to my seat. I was more into Drew Barrymore anyway, I reminded myself in quiet consolation. No, I thought somewhere deep down, I was more into Charlie.
Coming out of the closet at sixteen, I quickly discovered that inner-city pools were the ideal place to bask in my emerging sexuality and confidence. Spending the day at Prince Alfred Park Pool – camper than Christmas, with its staggered lawns and bright yellow umbrellas – felt like stepping into the glossy pages of DNA magazine. Everywhere you looked there were chiselled abs and gym-built bums you could imagine bouncing on like they were trampolines.
There were more pragmatic benefits to pools, too. In a pre-Grindr world, Victoria Park Pool was the perfect casual first-date location or meeting place, particularly because it attracted the elusive and highly sought-after first-year gays from Sydney University.
However, these days, for me, swimming pools have quite simply become the great Australian equaliser.
I now live in a slightly conservative part of the Gold Coast, with my partner of five years, and our building’s 25-metre pool refuses to discriminate. In the stick of summer it unites us with our neighbours: the middle-aged, crop top–wearing Russian woman with the ‘cops are tops’ bumper sticker; the openly homophobic 78-year-old with throat cancer; the redheaded hippy divorcee and her teenage daughter, Shania – named, of course, after the Twain. Regardless of age, sexuality or politics, we gather in the shared, inherently human discomfort of 35-degree days: air thick, as always, with the smell of chlorine.
And what could possibly be more Australian than that?
Car Windows
Tim Sinclair
‘Look at this faggot,’ the young man sneers to his mates. They’re standing around his muscle car in the narrow alleyway, so there’s no way not to get close as I walk past. It’s two in the afternoon. I can see bright sunshine streaming in at the end of the alley.
I’ve been here before. I know what to do. Look away, but don’t look away too obviously. Don’t run; don’t show fear. Just keep walking.
I walk past, hyper-aware of their distance from me, sweat prickling all over the back of my shirt. The three mates are watching me, watching their leader, waiting to see what’s going to happen next.
‘Faggot,’ he says again as I pass, and spits on me – a huge slimy gob I can feel through my shirt as it starts to slide down my chest. I’m so shocked I don’t react. It’s probably the thing that saves my life.
*
Growing up queer for me was fear: fear embedded so deeply it felt natural. It’s taken me years to peel back the scar tissue, to find out what was there in the first place. And I’m still scared. Do I get to belong now? Have I earned my rainbow stripes?<
br />
This is the problem of falling outside the either/or. I’m not gay. I’m not straight. I’m not alone in this, but for someone who’s always felt like an outsider, belonging becomes yet another question. Or is it the central question? I can’t tell anymore. I’ve wasted a lot of time waiting for somebody to give me the tick of approval.
*
‘How much do you charge?’ yells a kid out of a car window. Boys at the traffic lights. His friends are laughing and I lose my cool. I stick my middle finger up and lean over their bonnet. His face darkens and he starts to open the door, adrenaline spiking shards through my veins.
The light changes. His mates pull him in and he slams the door, bravado intact, and I fall backwards into myself, realising it’s a game, it’s just a fucking game. And that’s it, isn’t it? I’ve taken it too seriously. It’s supposed to just wash off. It’s words thrown out to test the water, and only faggots will rise to the bait, right? I’ve never known how to play this game.
*
I grew up in small-town Australia. Puberty in the 1980s. High school was almost entirely defined by trying to fit in, in any number of ways. Something started opening up at university in the ’90s, but I was still squeezed into the conservatism of Adelaide’s tightly gridded streets.
It stuns me now when I give writing workshops in high schools and hear open discussion of sexuality. I know that high school is still full of fear; I know adolescence is still an excruciating time. It’s not all rainbows, but it’s something.
*
My partner has a Chinese mother and an Anglo father. I learnt the term ‘halfie’ from her. I try hard not to map my experience over hers, because the last thing the world needs is yet another white man co-opting the story of a person of colour. But she has taught me a lot about being from neither one world nor another. She confuses a lot of people in Australia, where the mainstream expectation is whiteness, and people can’t quite get a read on her otherness.
From her I finally came to understand just how offensive is the question, So, where are you from? Because it never means that. It means, You’re not from here. It means, You’re not like us. It means, I’m the one who gets to judge, and I’m having trouble judging you, and that angers me. It means, What are ya?
So, somewhat like her story, but mostly like my own. Her experience, gently and generously shared, has helped me understand my own. Not a bit gay or mostly straight, but something else, something other, something that can confuse and anger people. What are ya?
‘Halfies are the prettiest people,’ she says. Does that apply to queers, too? Most of my life I’ve wanted to hide.
But I’m not queers. I’m me. I’m here, I’m queer, I’m in the rainbow soup – still figuring out exactly where; still trying to be okay with being my own particular kind of crouton. And this is the heart of the matter. Because if you can’t be yourself in your own way, then god help you when you die with a wallet full of fake IDs.
*
I like the word ‘queer’. It’s like a question, a question mark, a reminder. I’ve always asked questions. Have driven myself halfmad with them.
I embrace the word queer. It’s a query, a reminder to ask: Who are you? Who might you become? I hope I don’t get to the end of that question before I die.
I think it’s an important word for the world right now, as political debate degenerates to Us v. Them, as the glorious grey areas of the internet become ever more black and white. Queer is middle ground, blurred boundaries, somewhere a productive discussion might be had instead of a slogan-shouting match. Come in. Let’s talk. Let’s try to figure something out.
Perhaps I’m being optimistic. But I like the word queer.
*
In the early days, trying to figure it out. ‘Look, I just don’t know,’ I said. ‘In a room full of gay people I feel straight. And in a room full of straight people . . .’
‘. . . you feel like vomiting?’ my friend finished helpfully.
She was joking, but she’d hit on something: the physical discomfort of being mistaken for something I was not, of being misread as straight, or misread as gay – neither of which I was comfortable with.
The boys in the supermarket car park lean out the car window, fake-coughing ‘Poofter!’ ‘Faggot!’ I walk past them, not rising but rising, hurting, ashamed, unable to embody what I’m supposed to, which is fuck them fuck you fuck off cunt, flash my arse in contempt, anything to show that their taunts are not getting under my skin.
*
I started seeing K. She was queer, as were most of the friends I met through her. It was a revelation to me how matter of fact she was about it. We didn’t talk about it a lot because I still had so much work to do myself, but I observed her love for life and love for her friends, and marvelled at the way her sexuality was core to who she was but at the same time did not define her.
Partly, the work I had to do was in deconstructing layers of misplaced assumptions. We were walking in the city one day and fell in behind two young women holding hands, obviously lovers. This was the ’90s; to hold hands in public was a political act. I thought of K as very political, and my mind started spinning with fears that I was holding her back. What was she doing with a boy when she should be sticking it to society by being with a girl? I had a long way to go.
A friend of K’s saw the questions in me. We were talking about Queer Collaborations, the national tertiary-student queer conference, which was to be held in Adelaide that year.
‘And what about you?’ she asked, turning to me. ‘Are you going?’ She gave me a look that implied I probably should: part speculation, part invitation.
Who was I? How could I presume? Who did I think I was? All my old insecurities, gushing out into a new context.
I went. For one afternoon. With K, who was as smiling and outgoing as ever, complimenting the boys on their angel outfits as they walked past. I didn’t know where to look. What if they see me what if they see through me?
I chose a panel on storytelling. Something safe, somewhere I could sit in the back row and feel like I wasn’t being a total fake. In the break afterwards, K introduced me to a girl she’d met the day before and then wandered off to talk to somebody else.
‘And are you here with your boyfriend?’ she asked.
‘Ah . . . no,’ I stumbled. ‘I’m here with K.’
A pause. ‘You and she . . . are lovers?’
‘Um. Yeah.’ My face went bright red. One hour here and I’d been outed. I lurched away, I found K, I said I was going, I left.
*
Around the same time, my friend B found herself a girlfriend. She was wildly happy, but also frustrated by the simplistic conversation around her. ‘My community,’ she said scornfully. ‘Okay, I’m gay, but they’re not “my community”.’
I got it. There was this idea that once you’d clicked your heels three times and come out, a unicorn would appear in a rainbow of glitter and present you with your passport, and you’d be swept away to the embrace of your community. I was scared to come out because I didn’t know what I was coming out as. I was afraid of rejection, of seeming presumptuous, of having a different definition of queer to everybody else. Who would want to embrace me if all I was sure about was what I wasn’t?
I’d spent my life feeling uncomfortable with the community I’d grown up in, so why would I join another one? To me, ‘community’ was just another word for a group of people to stand on the outside of.
*
‘Do you take it up the arse?’ says the young man in Rundle Mall as I walk past. Bully’s posture: legs wide, head cocked in disdainful appraisal.
‘Sure!’ I say. I’ve started to reclaim. ‘It’s the only way to go.’ And his bravado pours out of his gaping mouth and he sits there wordlessly, stunned. I’ve taken his ammunition. But I walk away quickly, not turning around. Don’t turn around. Don’t make him come after you. Don’t make him try to save face in front of his friends, because surely this was a performance for his frien
ds.
*
I’m comfortable with my gender identity. Deeply troubled by what men can be, by what society expects them to be, by what men are capable of but, nevertheless, I’m a man in a man’s body.
My partner is similarly comfortable with her gender identity, but she feels that inside her there’s a sardonic gay New Yorker. Sometimes he’s not hidden very far inside. She grew up in New York, hanging out with her uncle’s group ‘Asians and Friends’, made up of gay Asian or Asian-American men with white partners. In the context of our relationship, she’s both the Asian and the Friend.
And that’s it, isn’t it? We’re complicated, we’re multiple, we’re many. All of us. It’s why I find labels so problematic. It’s why I like the word queer. It’s a fuzzy embrace. I can wrap myself up in that rainbow blanket and be me inside its warmth. And the people I love most are the ones who feel like they can sit inside that blanket cave with me and be them. Whoever they happen to be.
*
Back in Adelaide, I signed up with some friends to take part in ‘Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden’, a poetry reading in the Botanic Garden that was part of Feast, the Adelaide queer arts festival. I loved how camp the name was, how poofy. It was another ‘fuck you’ to the taunting voices. But then the program came out, and I realised that I hadn’t. My turn.
I went around to my parents’ house, discovering to my relief that only my mother was home. Not that I grew up in an especially homophobic household – it was more like a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. About everything.
