by Benjamin Law
‘I have an announcement,’ I blurted out, halfway through cup-of-tea time. I was making it more awkward for myself, and I could sense my mother’s growing discomfort.
I don’t remember the words I used. I’d practised a little speech, but I couldn’t tell you what I actually said. A few days later I went around again and found Dad in his shed. It was him who brought it up, completing our circuitous family communication.
‘Mum told me about the reading you’re doing,’ he said. I nodded, unable to speak. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’ And we went back to talking about his latest creation of wood and wire and leftover pieces from the botany department he’d salvaged from the skip outside his office.
I used to think it was my parents who’d discouraged me from speaking freely, speaking emotionally. I’ve come to realise I’m as much a part of the pattern as they are. Hold it inside. That’s what growing up queer has done to me. Hold it in. Don’t let people see what’s going on. Clench, shutter, cocoon. The term ‘coming out’ encapsulates so much, so perfectly.
My heart aches for the young people who are still dying inside their chrysalises, without ever having had the joy of flight.
*
I’m lucky. In so many ways. And the world we live in now feels a million miles from the fears of before. But there’s more work to do and there are more questions to ask. All I can do is try to embody the questions, try to inhabit them in the most honest way possible. Adhere to that simplest and most difficult of truths: it’s only me who gets to decide if I belong. And, maybe one day, I can find it in myself to love those terrified young men who scream their fear out of car windows.
Bent Man Running
Steve Dow
I was winning that day, a shy twelve-year-old dashing across the dewy grass of the technical school’s oval. This was a surprising elevation of my stature, as elsewhere on campus my unique practical skills confounded the supply of tomorrow’s carpentry and sheet-metal workforce, and my Physical Education report usually confirmed stereo-tropes of unmanly awkwardness. Australian Rules football was the religion of my fellow pimpled proletarians, but I was a short-arse who couldn’t connect his foot with the will of the ball. It was true that my great-grandfather had kicked goals for Carlton in a couple of grand finals at the dawn of the twentieth century – his name was Percy, and he was a policeman – but his genetic gift appeared to have gone south, along with any familial height advantage. ‘Steve tries hard, but . . .’ is the line I best remember from that page-long log of crimes against sport in south-suburban Frankston.
However, running simply required one foot in front of the other. It brought clarity to my spatially challenged self, a way forward. It allowed me to lose that habitual sense of difference and momentarily belong to the tribe, while averting eye contact, because eyes need to be cast forward. Thus I found myself ahead in the two-hundred-metre sprint.
I knew I was ahead, because I chose to look back, and saw my competitors at various points behind me: the usual alpha leader, with the freckles and protruding slack jaw; his beta boy chorus slugging along. That glance was the last thing I remember before I fell. As I slipped, I reached my right arm back to try to stop the fall.
The break and bend, on the lower forearm, was something to behold; my classmates closed around me and began pointing and commenting. ‘Look at his arm!’ said one bright spark with a nice line in the bleeding obvious. My head fuzzed as the pain connected to my synapses, and I regarded the arm with a mix of curiosity and revulsion, as though it were no longer part of my body. In one short snap I had gained my peers’ rapt attention – and also validated their habit of picking me last for teams: in this race, I’d not only come last, but was doubled over on the ground unable to stand up again.
That first time I broke my arm, the PE teacher scooped me up. He had tight curly hair on his head and chest; I know this because once he had taken his shirt off during a baseball game. The Americanness of baseball had seemed exciting, although I couldn’t make the bat connect with the ball there either. The teacher carried me in his arms, An Officer and a Gentleman–style, from the oval, past the brown-brick gymnasium and up the concrete stairs to the first-aid room. His clean-shaven face distinguished him from the moustachioed relief teacher who attended my next bone break, for I would repeat the exercise. Twice, in fact.
The next snap was on a polished gym floor during a game of basketball; and the third in the new year, when my foot became entangled in the spokes of my bicycle. I flipped over the handlebars onto the road, and my right arm, once again, failed to take my weight.
It was not all bad news. Having my arm in a cast granted temporary respite from the sick feeling that turned my stomach when I descended the stairs to the gymnasium every Tuesday and Thursday. A plaster leave pass.
Many of the boys in the combined 7G and 7H gym class joined in the regular change-room singalong, which went – to the tune of that well-known American western ballad in trochaic meter, ‘Oh My Darling, Clementine’ – ‘Pull your pants up, pull your pants up, pull your paaaaants up, Steven Dow.’ Besides the oddity of kids at the beginning of the 1980s singing a cowboy ode popularised by Bing Crosby in the 1940s, I wondered why they focused on my regular-looking pants. They were neither loose nor required pulling up. The inference went well beyond accusations of laziness. Was ‘pants’ a euphemism for ‘poofter’, or was I giving these guys too much credit? Why the archaic choice of tune? I should have punched the alpha leader or regaled his beta chorus with rapier wit about his inability to deviate from the same three lines, although the semitone key change had a certain admirable fluency.
Instead, I ignored them, and brooded. The bullies simply took this response as appeasement and continued. One day I cracked and walked out, leaving the singalong behind me.
‘He’s been busting a gut,’ said the curly-haired teacher, admonishing my classmates after I had marched my allegedly baggy pants out of there. I wish he’d written that endorsement on my PE report. Later, the curly one would shift the blame to me by saying I didn’t project myself enough to blend in. When he’d lugged a case of free chocolate Big Ms in cardboard cartons from the canteen to class, for instance, I’d failed to take one alongside each of my classmates. It was through this abject reluctance to drink flavoured milk that I had brought the bullying upon myself, totally undoing my work in busting a gut.
Shame shifting was also the tactic of the Year 7 coordinator, to whose office I was summoned later that day to explain my walk out. ‘Do you feel close to men?’ asked the nanna-looking coordinator, apropos of nothing, relevant to zilch. Her permanent wave and spectacles only accentuated her beady, quizzical eyes, searching my face for portals of potential gossip. ‘No,’ I replied. I wasn’t going to confide anything in her even if I could name it, not even my curiosity with moustaches. I had not long before read that the hirsute Village People were sympathetic to something called ‘gay liberation’ and I thought that was kind of them, though it seemed an abstract concept with no application to myself.
I was nineteen before I would test my sympathy to heterosexuality. I did this by paying to lose my virginity to a female sex worker. She had long brown hair, and while I watched a physically taut straight couple have sex on stage, she slid into the bank of seats next to me and whispered, ‘Would you like to come upstairs?’ I don’t remember the music that was playing at that moment, though I do recall a female stripper who had earlier owned the stage by unfurling herself to Peter Gabriel’s melancholic ‘In Your Eyes’. I must have been there a while.
Having been successfully fellated and mounted in a bedroom behind a locked metal gate, through no skill set of my own – ‘There’s no feeling in the world like it,’ the sex worker instructed me – I dashed down Darlinghurst Road in Kings Cross through the night’s thrum of people. I couldn’t tell you what made me run. Maybe I was trying to catch up to the tribe. Or trying to find Oxford Street and what I really wanted – men – but this was an unnamed need which would t
ake me a few more years to act upon.
It is 2018. I am pulling my chest to the bar at CrossFit. Pronated grip, with my palms wrapped over the top of the bar, is sometimes preferable to supinated grip – palms wrapped under the bar – due to a lingering kink from all the breaks in my right arm, which prevent complete forearm rotation. Two laps of running the laneway equals eight hundred metres, and I only occasionally remind myself not to look back to assess the advancing party. This is not a competition. I’m usually running behind most of the people in the class anyway, because many are half my age. I’m glad to just finish the workout of the day, the torturous crossover of cardio and weights, without a little vom. Functional fitness, they call it. And yet my awkwardness lingers: I can’t really skip beyond a basic bounce, for the pattern of running while skipping is spatially beyond me – a brisk foot, rope, foot, rope rhythm becomes a sluggish foot, foot, rope – and I have given up trying to kick up into a handstand. The GP suggests the stiffness in my left hip and lower back might be early signs of arthritis, but clearly such a development would be unfair, because I am red in the face like a National Party water hoarder and busting a gut, as old-school PE teachers used to say.
I got an email recently from one of the guys from school. I hadn’t heard his name in decades. He wrote to apologise for the bullying; said his own son was now about the age we were then, giving him pause for thought. Maybe his son was also stereotypically non-conformist on the sporting field, if you know what I’m saying. I recall cruelly retaliating at this guy one day on the grassy knoll above the gym by calling him ‘Helium Head’. He did have an outsized head, though maybe he eventually grew into it. Anyway, he had responded with a punch to my nose, drawing blood. I wrote back to the email cheerily and said no, the experience hadn’t affected me, and attached a drawing of a balloon with a cartoon face. Not really.
I have been living happily with the same guy, conveniently also named Steve, for almost twenty years, contentedly out as a gay man since my mid-twenties – let’s say ‘queer’ for solidarity – yet I say little about my relationship in my CrossFit classes. For instance, whenever I mentioned our rescue dog, Oscar – who shared our lives for eleven years and four months until he breathed his last in early 2019 – he somehow, unthinkingly, became ‘my dog’ rather than ‘our dog’. Now that I think about it, I see that I evade follow-up questions about my personal life. An old reflex.
Am I wary of being judged in this environment? Nobody in these workout classes has ever given me real cause to be cautious, save the odd incautious trainer’s remark that I’m a few beats behind those who are younger and therefore fitter. The laughter is communal, and never at someone’s physical or other shortcomings. Here they cheer you on, even when you’re coming last. But I need to stop running now.
I need to draw breath.
The Bent Bits Are the Best Bits
Jax Jacki Brown
‘Would you rather be deaf or blind?’
I hate this game. Can’t she tell?
I know where it’s going, and its headed straight for me and my body. I stare at the ground as I walk, watch my right foot drag with every step, careful where I put my sticks so I don’t slip up in front of her. The ends of my sticks make a small thunk sound as I press them into the grass – right, left, right – as we slowly walk beside each other.
My toes have calluses on the tops of them from years of being pulled along the ground. The palms of my hands and my knees are callused too, from crawling everywhere, through bush tracks, over rocks, across sand. Most of the time I don’t feel ashamed. I like being near to the land, knowing it close up, seeing the things others miss, feeling it with my hands, knees and toes, all at once – three parts of me where others only give their feet.
I know everyone thinks I should feel ashamed. Walking is considered better than crawling. Walking gets me praised by Mum for showing how straight I can be. Dad calls me his ‘little trooper’.
Eight-year-olds shouldn’t crawl. ‘Only babies crawl’ – that’s what Chris, my brother’s friend, says. It’s his mum who is beside me now, so I must keep walking even though this part of the track is the best bit for crawling.
There is a small muddy creek. It’s two and a half cripple steps or three crawls wide. My dad has built a little bridge over it, but the wood is dark and always burning from the sun, so I prefer to crawl or walk through the creek instead. I love feeling the cool water, the way my stick ends are sucked into the black mud so when I pull them free they make a popping sound.
Frogs live here. I’ve caught them with my brother, captured them in buckets and carried them to our shack. We put them on the big windows in the front room and watch their feet suction onto the glass, climbing up, up, trying to get away.
‘Do you ever wish you could walk, be normal . . . that you weren’t handicapped?’
My whole body flinches at her question. I really want to sit down but I am determined – that’s what they tell me. I don’t give up. That’s a good thing, right?
It will take me years to know my limits, to learn to rest when I need to, to stop pushing myself. To tell people to fuck off.
She smells of cigarettes and sunscreen – and secrets. I want to tell her I know some of hers, some things that she is so scared will spill out she gets migraines from the pressure of holding them inside. I know she has one vagina flap longer than the other – Mum told me. She’s done some sex thing with the man she’s having an affair with, and that’s stretched it. I imagine it, that long flap, tucked up inside her swimmers, a small bulge on one side. Does it chafe as she walks, slowly, beside me?
I want to ask how her flap is going. What does she tell her husband, who drinks too much VB and yells at my father for being a ‘fucking dole-bludging hippy’? How does she explain how her flap came to be? Does she feel ashamed of it? Or does she secretly feel proud? Does she pull it to make it grow? Does she wish she could just let it out?
*
‘Are you a boy or a girl?’
‘I . . . don’t know. What do you think I am?’
‘You’re a girrrl . . . are you? Why’s your hair so short?’
‘I like it. Mum shaved it for me. Wanna feel it? It’s all smooth.’
‘You’re weird. Girls have long hair, don’t you know?’
We paddle on our boogie boards in the still, warm water of the lagoon and don’t say anything for a bit. There are lice in my cozzie and sometimes they bite my crotch. They particularly like the crotch.
Not many kids are allowed to swim here: just me and my brother and sometimes other kids when their parents are too drunk to care.
It’s full of piss. Actual man piss. The clubhouse runs beside it and on a ‘clubby night’, when they are having a ‘do’, all the blokes duck around the side of the club and piss into this water. Mum says it’s good for our immune system. ‘Just try not to drink it, okay?’
‘Where’s your parents?’ I ask.
‘My mum’s gone.’
She breathes in hard. ‘And my dad . . . he shot himself in the head . . . my brother found him . . . that’s why he’s so angry.’
‘Your brother is real scary. He chased us with a knife yesterday, just for going near your place, there was blood on it.’
‘It was only tomato sauce, not real blood,’ she says.
*
I am bleeding. Bleeding in my undies. In my grandpa’s outdoor toilet that smells of old dog and mildew. My belly and my thighs ache.
I get home and tell Mum that I must have hurt myself somehow. Mum gets all excited and says, ‘No, it’s just your period, you’re becoming a woman now.’
I think, What if I don’t want to become a woman? What if I want to be a person, or a boy with short hair? I don’t say this out loud. My parents didn’t cope when I started writing ‘I want a dick, love Jack’ on all the Christmas and birthday cards to our family. I keep it inside.
Mum gets a bag of old white nappies, cut up and now used as rags, down from a hook in the laundry
and shows me how to fold them over and put them inside my undies. It feels so big and bulky down there.
That afternoon, Dad takes me to my physio, where my body is pulled and stretched. It hurts, really hurts, but I never ask them to stop. I think to myself, I’m good, and if I try hard enough I’ll become normal. I imagine myself above myself, looking down. From up here, I am safe. I can endure whatever they decide to do, whatever they declare is in my ‘best interests’. This body is not mine. I will grow into something else.
Carla, the physio, gives me a present to remind me of how ‘straight and tall’ I can be if I just keep trying. If I keep giving my body over to the pain, I will become straighter, right? A little statue of an emperor penguin with his ‘shoulders back, and legs straight, Jacki,’ Carla says in her thick Polish accent. I hate her, but I push this hate down into myself.
I am exiled from my body. It will take years to come home.
*
She pushes me in my new wheelchair up the ramp and I loll my head into her breasts for the briefest of moments, letting the back of my head touch her through her red school jumper. She doesn’t notice, or she thinks it’s an accident. I’m nervous and sweaty. I feel like this all the time around her recently. I can’t look her in the eyes anymore, and I don’t know what to say when she asks me what I think about Daniel, the boy all the Year 8 girls seem to have a crush on. She keeps bugging me to ask out Mathew, the only other person in our school in a wheelchair, but I don’t like him like that, and he really doesn’t like me, not even as a mate, he’s made that clear.
At night I lie awake and imagine her on top of me, kissing me, her thick curly hair falling in my face. I imagine touching her breasts lightly. I feel my naturally tense muscles tighten further as I touch myself. I don’t know what our bodies would do together beyond this naked making out. My special school had no sex ed classes and our high school health classes don’t talk about girls getting together.
