by Benjamin Law
Mum called me into her bedroom a few months ago and said it would take a ‘special kind of man’ to love me. ‘If you ever get into bed with a man,’ she said, ‘make sure he has a condom on at all times.’ I imagine a disembodied cock sliding across a bed towards me, limp condom drooping off its tip, threatening to fall off.
*
I’m immobilised. I can’t move. I don’t know how I am going to get up and make it to the car to head home. I’m trying really hard not to look at her breasts but they are so close to her face and I’m trying to avoid looking at her lips. so I keep looking down . . . Why do breasts have to be so close to faces? And why do I always have to be at breast height in this wheelchair? It’s a cruel trick.
I shouldn’t have had any puffs on this joint. Damn it! I was just trying to be cool, to relax so I could talk to her, but now there are big gaps between what she says and me trying to find words to respond and she is so close to me . . . and so damn beautiful . . . she’s showing me her stoner artwork and wanting to know about my art, but my mouth is so dry and my hands are so sweaty . . . and I . . . don’t know what to say and I’m sure if I speak I’ll just say ‘I want you.’
Mum and Dad come and pick me up and I talk about her all the way home, about how cool she is, and how rad her artwork is. Mum says, ‘It’s good you have a friend, darling, you seem to really like her.’ I blush and fall silent. I try to stop the shaking in my legs, pressing down hard on my knees, Mum can read my body in a way that others can’t; she knows shaking legs means I’m feeling emotional. I hope she doesn’t work out why.
*
It’s dawn. I can see the light around the edges of the thick motel blind. I’m wearing my blue winter PJs, the ones Mum got me for Christmas with the tiny sheep on them that say ‘baaah, bedtime’ in big black font.
I roll over and can see her silhouette; she is turned away from me, lying on her side, snoring softly. I wiggle over until I am almost touching her, almost spooning her. ‘Are you awake?’ I whisper into the centimetre of air between me and her neck. Nothing. I reach up and run a finger over her shoulder and down her back to where her tank top starts. This. This is the bravest, most exhilarating thing I have ever done. She stirs, and I ask again softly, ‘Are you awake?’ ‘I am now,’ she says, and I slide my arm around her and stroke her belly.
We stay in that bed, in that room, for a week, watching midday cooking shows turned up loud and having sex softly and awkwardly.
When she has to go home to Sydney and I have to return home because my parents are getting back from holidays, she gives me the cassette tape she made for our week together and has a dozen red roses and chocolates delivered to my door. Mum comes into my room with them and says, ‘Well, you haven’t been seeing a man, because a man wouldn’t think to do this.’ I say, ‘No, it’s this girl I met online.’ Mum tells me not to make my life harder than it already is, and to not tell anyone because it’s probably just a phase. ‘Everyone’s experimented at some point, Jack.’
*
I’m in love with her from the first time she kisses me. We kissed for about five hours that night. She invites me over for dinner a few days later and we end up in her bed. When I eventually get the courage to remove my clothes, she says, ‘This is not what I was expecting . . .’ ‘What?’ I reply. ‘You . . . you carry yourself like you’re hiding something under your clothes, like you’re ashamed . . . but you’re beautiful, do you know that?’
I don’t know that. But I know she is beautiful, and I know I can’t disconnect from my body with her. She calls me into it, slowly and gently. I catch glimpses of myself under her hands and under her mouth, and I am not ‘wrong’ or ‘strange’ but desired, just as I am.
In the early hours of the morning she brings her guitar to bed, and in the soft candlelight plays me Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade into You’. ‘I want to hold the hand inside you’, and I know this night will stay with me for a lifetime.
Healing is found in this moment. Healing from all the shame that was placed on me and my body by all the doctors and therapists who treated me as fundamentally ‘wrong’ and needing to be ‘fixed’, who tried to push me closer to some elusive idea of ‘normal’, to unbend me, make me straighter. Those treatments were done to my body throughout my childhood in the name of ‘normalisation’ and my supposed ‘best interests’.
She holds me as we fall asleep, and healing finds me; it seeps into my muscles, whispering, ‘You are enough, you are whole.’
I find all the beautiful things our small town has to offer – flowers, chocolates, a hand-made waistcoat – and pile them on my bed for her, to say, ‘I love you, and thank you.’ But it is too much, too soon, and she says she doesn’t feel the same way back, and leaves.
I cannot listen to Mazzy Star for five years without aching.
*
I discover disability pride in books long before I find a disability-rights community in person. It finds me first in the small TAFE library, as I wheel past an even smaller LGBTIQA+ collection titled (I kid you not) ‘Deviance’. A book called Exploring Disability: A Sociological Introduction describes the disability rights movement and introduces me to the social model of disability, which argues that disability is not a personal problem but a social issue of entrenched systematic discrimination and exclusion of people with non-normative bodies and minds. This radical reframing of the ‘problem’ of disability not as a personal issue but as a political one transforms my thinking about myself and the world. Slowly I work through my internalised ableism and begin to seek out other people with disabilities – they are my people, and together we can advocate for change!
Queer sex and masturbation become a way to reconnect with my body, to breathe into it, and to fully experience it, to love it.
*
I am curled around my partner, her fingers lovingly tracing the bend of my legs. I am breathing in this moment, letting it settle into my muscle memory, letting healing find me.
I am calling my body home. I am reclaiming it. I am naming it as mine. Reconnection is found in these quite moments, pride nurtured.
There is lightning in my legs; big jolts like electricity run up me. I can feel them building before they strike. I love how my body moves, how my emotions and my muscles are intertwined, how I wear my feelings on the surface.
Our baby wriggles inside Anne’s belly in response to my jumps. Our little being will be here soon, and it feels like the most terrifying and hopeful thing I have ever done.
I lie my hand on our tiny moving human and think about all the things I want to teach her. I imagine her learning to say ‘My body, my choice!’ and the power of this –particularly if she happens to have a disability.
I feel a big spasm building in my left leg. I close my eyes and breathe myself into it, breathe my pride and politics and all that I know now, breathe it all into that electric feeling in my body. And as it moves, I send this energy back: back to that kid I was, who was taught only shame. I send pride, love, community. I tell her the bent bits are the best bits.
The baby kicks, Anne sleeps.
Reunion
Kelly Parry
I never thought I would make it to a fortieth school reunion. Yet here I am.
After a couple more drinks, the big questions begin. ‘You weren’t always gay, though, were you? Not while you were at school?’ ‘We shared a bed so many times, how come you never made a move on me? You never even tried to kiss me.’
What do I say? We were teenagers, we went to an all-girl Catholic school, you had a boyfriend. And you were juggling so many dicks you could have been hired by a circus. Me? I was still trying to work out who I was or might one day become. And after all, it was forty years ago.
In 1978 girls were divided into categories: ‘frigid’, and two kinds of ‘mole’ – ‘slack-arsed’ or ‘regular’. Confusingly, you could be a ‘frigid mole’, but only if you were a prick-tease. Guys were ‘spunkrats’ or ‘deadshits’. Deadshits got dropped if they told their mates they
’d rooted you when you’d only been fingered. When life was good it was ‘bitching’; when things were rough it was ‘bullshit’.
Many remember it as a golden time to have been young. The second wave of feminism, free love, readily available contraception and Cosmo magazine offering step-by-step instructions on how to give the best blow jobs meant that as young women we were encouraged to push the traditional boundaries when it came to sex and relationships. Just so long as it was heterosexual and it was what the guys wanted. There was no mention of queer.
My earliest memories as a kid growing up in the suburbs of Brisbane are of being aware that I was breaking unspoken, unnamed or unknown rules. It wasn’t just the summer heat that was stifling. A man was king of his castle, a woman’s place was in the home, and children should be seen and not heard. Gender roles and social constructs were as tight and twisted as old Aunty May’s corset.
Each time I was offered a doll I asked for a book; when they gave me the doll instead, I shaved her hair and turned her into a nun. At that stage I was an only child, so my quirks and peculiarities were attributed to my lack of siblings. They hoped I’d grow out of it. But I knew the truth. I knew I could never grow out of being myself.
There’s a photo of me. I’m dressed in a white singlet and big white undies. I am standing in my grandparents’ backyard, honey brown, squinting up into the sun, smiling. My curly blonde hair is done up in rollers and I’m pushing a huge old lawnmower. I was a little girl who looked like a Barbie and behaved like a Ken.
The backyard, under the cool of the mulberry tree, was my favourite place. Bloated blowflies fresh from the bin jostled for space on my toes and nose. While my family got drunk on cold glasses of beer, the bees got drunk on the delicious nectar of passionfruit flowers. It was here I could ponder in peace how it was possible to feel the things I felt for Rhonda. When I would see her floating by on her perfect powder-blue Malvern Star bike, I wanted to run inside and tell my family that she made me smell frangipani and taste vanilla paddle-pop. But I didn’t. My instincts for self-preservation were strong – I’ve always been part cockroach.
I found I was another kind of animal when my teen hormones and natural curiosity kicked in, right around the time I found my father’s hidden stash of soft-porn magazines. He had brought them back from a trip to the United States. God bless America. It was in one of these magazines that I met Busty Barb and her friend Suzie the Swinger. It was the first time I had read the terms ‘hot lesbo’, ‘sexy bi bitch’ and ‘split wet beaver’. And there were pictures to go with them. Unrealistic porn fantasy it may have been, but I was like Alice diving down the rabbit hole. I was falling fast into an unknown world and I wasn’t going to stop myself.
Although my old schoolfriends may be miffed that I hadn’t wanted muff in my teens, at that time in my youth I still enjoyed playing with boys. I was even trying desperately to fall in love with them. I said and did all the right things, but it still felt very wrong.
At age twenty I escaped Brisbane and moved to Sydney to study acting. To support myself I worked as a tea lady at a private hospital that specialised in late-term abortions and the removal of anal warts. I was living the dream. My share house was filled with people and drugs and music and art and fucking and parties that were full of people fucking while making music, taking drugs and calling it art. Everyone was gay or straight, or gay and straight, or bisexual, or adventuring. It was a perfect time to spread those wings and fly. When I landed, I was in love with another woman. It was an easy feeling. I didn’t feel pressured to love more or feel guilty that I loved less, like I had when I’d tried to love boys.
That first time being in love with a woman wasn’t perfect and it didn’t last, but it was right. Not right enough to tell my family, but right enough to tell my friends. On the coming-out-o-meter, they were varying degrees of cool acceptance to fulsome embrace. The early 1980s were a magic time in the land of gay. Before AIDS arrived to devastate us and change our world, the boys were having the time of their lives and I was happy to hag along.
But not as ‘a lesbian’, oh gosh no. I was a woman who fell in love with other women. And slept with them. A lot. But lesbian? Although not yet ready to acknowledge my internal homophobe, homophobia and I were quickly becoming acquainted. People who happily gave me acting roles before they knew that I pounded the mound, munched the minge, scissored the sisters – or whatever they imagined my sex life to include – were now ‘casting their net more widely’. Don’t call us and we will conveniently forget to call you. Becoming myself meant I was compelled to choose between a closet and a hard place. I went to the hairdresser and told him I wanted to look like Annie Lennox, the most lesbian thing I could think of to do. The second most lesbian thing was to grab a girl-friend, buy a car and drive to Perth. So I did that too. I chose the terror and wonder of freedom.
I didn’t come out to my parents until I was twenty-six and living in Melbourne, safe in the knowledge I was two states away from them. I didn’t expect it to go well and I wasn’t surprised by their reactions. Banned from attending family weddings, funerals or Christmas in case I said anything about having a girlfriend to any extended family members, my circulation was reduced to inner-circle family members only. My parents would never be ready to come out.
I, on the other hand, was becoming a whiz at it. I met my current partner at an early morning work meeting and fell Hollywood-style in love at first sight. I had never wanted kids; I felt mine was a genetic pool not to be tapped. She insisted otherwise, and in the days when the internet was in its infancy we searched for ways to make our own babies. This involved endless comings out to potential sperm donors, including our favourite waiter, who immediately offered his semen along with our café lattes.
Romance and baby-making for same-sex couples are not necessarily connected. We used to pick up the semen from our lovely donor, swing by and grab a pizza and come home and inseminate. We told everyone, including the pizza guy what was going on, in graphic detail. In the end, I used to explain it as if it was a veterinary procedure: take one small round furry hole, one jar of yucky smelling liquid, fill a syringe with said liquid, place in hole and squirt. Less like hot sex, more like worming the cat. But it did get the job done. Twice.
I’m not sure what was more stressful – coming out to my family as a lesbian or as pregnant.
Once you have kids your identity changes, you are no longer a red-hot sex-bitch lesbian; you are a parent in a very straight world. When we enrolled the kids in preschool, we said that we were a two-mummy family. The worker wrote that we were Mormon. Somehow that was a more logical leap than lesbians.
Although it could have gone either way, having children did build a bridge to my parents that I hadn’t anticipated. We were a family – unnatural and ungodly, but a family none the less. Over the years my parents mellowed, slightly; they love their grandkids and they certainly like my girlfriend more than they like me. Ironically, when Australia was subjected to the cowardly plebiscite on marriage equality, I called Mum and Dad to do my weekly check-in and the first thing my super-conservative, Pauline Hanson–loving Catholic mother said was, ‘We’ll be voting “Yes” in the marriage equality thing. Everyone deserves an equal chance to be miserable.’
I never thought I would make it to a fortieth school reunion. Yet here I am: clean, sober and queer, answering coming-out questions, hearing stories from parents with queer kids and sharing photos of my own family.
I scroll through my phone, surrounded by delighted faces. ‘Here’s my partner of twenty-four years – that’s at least twelve hundred straight years. This is our daughter, she’s just started at uni; here is our son, he’s in Year 11; this is our eldest daughter, she adopted us when she got kicked out of home at fifteen when her parents found out she was gay. She’s now a psychologist. And this adorable little Sudanese guy is a new addition. He comes for weekends with white people while his mum works.’
Queer connections run deep and wide – not only th
rough choice, but also through necessity. Although this was not supposed to be a coming-out story, it always ends up that way. We lose family, friends and former lives when we begin the process of showing the world the truth of ourselves. This is why the family we create is expansive and welcoming and safe. We are bonded together by oppression and revolution, radical acts and the comfort of the ordinary, love bites and battle scars, addiction and sobriety, fear and courage, birth and death. Blood and genetics are a minor part of what true family is for me. Love and tears plus laughter and kindness, minus fuckery, multiplied by time equals family. It’s not a perfect formula, but it works for me.
You Can Take the Queer Out of the Country
M’ck McKeague
I never feel too far away from my childhood – my coming out story and the journey that led to it is a well-rehearsed script. At thirty, I’ve had enough audiences now to know which parts land easily and which parts hang uncomfortably in the air between us. I’ve learnt how to gloss over the uncomfortable parts, and how to emphasise the parts that affirm people’s preconceived ideas about trans people. It’s a skill most of us learn the hard way.
By 2015, I was tired of the edited version of my story, so I decided to painstakingly recreate my teenage bedroom – every Placebo poster, every never-sent love letter, every tortured diary entry, every life-saving CD, every incomprehensible MSN conversation – and invited strangers to walk in, make themselves at home and dig through the uncensored detritus of my adolescent existence in early 2000s Rockhampton. The installation, titled NEVERLAND (well, this is embarrassing) was an attempt at exposing some of the complexities and contradictions that are so frequently erased in dominant queer and trans narratives. As I dug into the relics of my past I found ‘born this way’ thoroughly tangled up with ‘doing a really convincing job of trying desperately not to be this way’. I remembered that my first experiences of having my queerness being seen and understood were bound up in the fabric of my (ostensibly) cis-straight first love.
