Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  Making and presenting this work was scary, uncomfortable and, living up to its title, quite embarrassing. It made me reflect a lot on the cost of the curatorial process we often feel pressured into when we retell our histories in the endless quest to prove our identities legitimate.

  We relive our histories to rewrite them and too often, in the drafting process, erase ourselves altogether. All that remains is a half-sentence from our diary that matches what a trans kid on Four Corners said, the sick feeling in the pit of our stomach when we went shopping for our high-school formal, the angsty crush we had on our best friend. Supposedly these memories legitimise us. We are certified, stamped and filed. The more of these memories we can gather from our histories, and the better we get at erasing what was once in between, the easier it is to find acceptance and community.

  In Brisbane and Melbourne, I am extremely privileged to have found queer and arts communities where I generally feel valued, understood and cared for. However, thirteen years after flying the coop it still baffles me that when I say I’m from Central Queensland responses usually range from subtle disgust to mild fear to the most patronising sympathy. I can only imagine how this intensifies for my friends from much further north or further west than where I’m from.

  When I moved to Brisbane from Rockhampton as a seventeen-year-old, I was a bottle of Passion Pop that had been shaken too long and too hard. I didn’t know that non-binary trans people even existed, let alone that I could be one. I didn’t know that I was living with bipolar. I didn’t know that my best friends from high school were all silently dealing with their own, freakishly similar, internalised nightmares. All I knew was that by age twelve I’d made the decision to leave Rocky, and at age fourteen I got a job so I could start saving to leave. Basically, as soon as they let me out of the gate with my Year 12 certificate, I packed up to start a new life in the Big Smoke.

  This is the story we all know and love: angsty artsy/alternative/queer kid escapes oppressive country town and lives happily ever after in a progressive metropolitan wonderland. It does get better! Thank goodness.

  This is the story I told others (and myself) for years. I learnt quickly from the disgust–fear–sympathy trifecta reaction that the shame I felt about coming from the bogan beef capital was precisely what I should feel. I learnt that distancing myself from my history as much as possible, and as fast as possible, was the only way to be taken seriously in the ‘progressive’ landscape I now occupied. And, without questioning it, I got out my eraser and set to work.

  In 2006, my first year living in Brisbane, I became acutely aware of the parts of myself that were unpalatable to queers who grew up in the city. My penchant for XXXX Bitters and low-brow nu metal was reason for ridicule. My central Queensland accent was cause for humiliation. This might seem harmless at first, but the process of attempting to remove them from my history and my sense of self, or at the very least trivialise them, did more damage than you might imagine. How do you change your accent when it comes back stronger in every conversation with your family and oldest friends? How can you hold space in your life for the people who are embedded in it when you’re ashamed of your own story? How can you feel whole when the validation of your gender or sexual orientation comes at the cost of the place you’ve called home for most of your life?

  There are two main, acceptable versions of your story: 1. It is awful here; I’m really struggling; please help me get out of here because I obviously couldn’t do it without your incredible, glittershitting self. And 2. It was awful there. I really struggled. I’m so glad I am out now and that I’m allowed to shit glitter almost anytime I want.

  These stories are not necessarily lies. They’re just over-simplified. When the only card you have to play in your hand is to tell your story the way people expect to hear it, you end up feeling – at least partially – erased. Reduced, condensed, disavowed.

  Of course, when someone manages to extricate themselves from an abusive or oppressive environment, it is cause for celebration. For me, leaving Rockhampton was a huge and important decision. But when metropolitan queer communities make it mandatory that you escape (or literally die trying) in order to legitimise who you are, we contribute further to a dangerous isolation that spans more than the number of kilometres to the nearest major city. The much vaunted ‘escape’ is contingent on a myriad of privileges. What would my story look like if I had needed to financially support my family when I got that job at fourteen? What would my story look like if I wasn’t white? The unqualified celebration of those queers who leave comes overwhelmingly at the expense of the complex reasons some might need – or, as shocking as this sounds, want – to stay, and implicitly contributes to the intersecting oppressions that are bound up in that choice.

  And okay, I get it. When you think of regional and rural Queensland, there are very real reasons you think of Bob Katter and Pauline Hanson and a homogenous mass of aggressive, bigoted, white, uneducated cis dudes that you believe make up the entire Australian population outside of the south-east corner. But aside from how reductive and classist these assumptions are, they render invisible every marginalised person whose life is materially affected by the Pauline Hansons and Bob Katters of those areas. These conversations are centred on the oppressors and forget the survivors altogether – unless of course they have successfully escaped (yay for them!) or are too young to move (don’t worry, it gets better!).

  What about the people who stay? And what about the people who leave but return later as adults? Whether these life decisions happen by ‘choice’ (see also: false dichotomies), necessity, or through lack of access, queers who remain in the country are treated as less than those who don’t. It is assumed they are stupid, that they brought it on themselves, that they ‘chose’ geographical isolation and therefore deserve social isolation. Or you assume they simply don’t exist.

  In my own desperate need to rid myself of all things Rocky, I treated good people like shit. I had no compassion for myself, so I had very little sympathy for my loved ones who were all deeply affected by their own regional and rural histories. I felt ashamed, afraid that the people from my past would expose me for the imposter I felt I was in my newfound city community. I had learnt how to talk the talk – or so I thought – and so if you didn’t sound like a bona fide left-wing, urban arts undergrad I no longer had time for you. Never mind the actual substance of what you were saying.

  Since recognising my own internalised stigma, I’ve come to see how often people dismiss the experiences of people from regional and rural backgrounds. These dismissers are often Good People – critical thinkers, people with a good grasp of classism, sexism, racism, ableism, and so on. But, somehow, once the obligatory ‘please remember that not everyone can come out safely’ memo is posted into the Facebook void for International Coming Out Day, country queers are either forgotten or explicitly considered inferior. This forgetting, this unchecked conflation of boganism with bigotry, and the many other ways, both subtle and overt, that people from regional and rural areas are stigmatised, is getting old. It’s high time that we acknowledge the complexity of the lives of those who don’t, or didn’t always, live in a major city. And when we do this, it needs to be with absolute care for those who have sustained trauma through living in regional, rural and/or isolated areas, regardless of whether or not they have relocated to a major city. We need to acknowledge our privileges and listen deeply and carefully to one another’s stories, to hear beyond the slang or inflection or personal circumstances that we might be conditioned to cringe at. We need to make space for stories to be told with depth, nuance and in brash, twangy, to-the-point short sentences.

  Because you can take the queer out of the country*, but you can’t take the country out of our queer histories. Believe me, I tried.

  __________________________

  * Usually I would only use the word ‘country’ to describe specifically rural areas, because life and amenities and access to the privileges of community are diffe
rent for people in these places than for those living in relatively large regional towns. However it was snappier than saying ‘You can take the queer out of the regional, rural and/or isolated geographical area but . . .’ I hope my friends from the actual country will forgive me for this.

  The Risk

  Thom Mitchell

  Few people grow up queer in Australia: we’re not allowed to. Heterosexuality guards its supremacy. I used to sleep with a guy whose parents attempted to exorcise him. It wasn’t like in the movies – ambush and surprise. It was planned. He let them try it. They had raised him, after all. Besides, what would it change? Straight culture makes exorcists of us all.

  I grew up in a beautiful house on an emerald hill at a place called The Risk, deep dairy country, in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales. Our gravel driveway was a kilometre long and edged into the paddocks after big rain. When my mother turned off the highway she’d cross the first of three cattle grids and the red flash of her car would kick up a cloud of streaming dust. Attuned to her movements, I sometimes heard her car thrum across the second grid, which gave me about a minute to shut down the computer and disappear into my bedroom. The desktop was in the kitchen, next to the landline ran Dodo dial-up that whirred with the effort of loading porn. Sometimes the old Windows 98 froze. Never me.

  Often I didn’t hear Mum’s approach until she crossed the third grid, breaching the border of our five-acre property. She took the bend fast, past the Moreton Bay fig and the stables and into the garage, where she always stopped abruptly and close to the wall. Our border collie, Bear, had a special yodel for greeting. If I was lucky, Mum would lean down to pat her or pause to gather up groceries. I never got caught but would often slip out of the kitchen just at the moment she entered. For any adolescent, these stakes would be high. For me, they were higher.

  In Year 7 I had a close friend who lived in a flood-plain house with a lower storey that was forever half built. Upstairs we ate plain rice with his parents. They never ventured below. Down there the floor was in place, but the walls were just frames with fabric stretched taut: thin membranes between us and the world, flimsy partitions that threatened osmosis. Down there, my friend and I palpitated on his brother’s bed. Our fingers felt for warm flesh in hushed, furtive stages that grew like raised stakes in a gambler’s bet. It was only a hand job. It didn’t take long and remorse came with release. ‘Disgusting,’ we said. ‘Dirty.’ We were thirteen. That was my first sexual experience. We went back upstairs and I couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. It was never mentioned again.

  I can’t tell you his name, because it’s uncommon. I don’t want to out him, embarrass him, or bring on retribution – from where, I don’t know. Often it’s enough just to speak or be seen. I can’t explain the shame either. It was the kind that makes you wish you would vanish. To be ‘gay’ was to be the butt of a joke that you too were making; to accept yourself was self-destructive. I don’t know how much of that loathing I still bear within me, or how much silence.

  Around that time I watched Brokeback Mountain. There’s a violence in the way the two men kiss and fuck that reflects the hostility of their environment. Ennis is haunted by the spectre of two faggots who were tortured and murdered. He’s never able to meet Jack’s yearning. Love is not love – it’s a ‘fishing trip’. Only when Jack dies does Ennis realise: that which is suppressed and left unspoken proves the most painful.

  I lay on a mattress in front of the TV, Mum and her boyfriend, Bill, behind me on the couch. My body sensed the sex scene coming. The satin of adolescent boxers is so loose and thin. When it began I rolled over onto my belly.

  ‘Ugh. Come on,’ said Bill. ‘That’s a bit much. Do we have to watch this?’ He was also shifting in his seat, sounding off little grunts of discomfort. ‘It’s just a bit off.’

  Bill was fond of saying, ‘Children should be seen and not heard,’ and so I said nothing.

  The film was especially apposite because at the time I was a cowboy, of sorts. I grew up on horseback and couldn’t wait to go droving. My mentor was an old-timer named Roy – a farrier, drover and dealer in horses. He had the lease on the Wiangaree Rodeo Ground and used to break in horses there at the yards. Roy had a hawkish nose, a hernia and a bung knee; was a self-proclaimed geriatric. He grinned ‘like a rat with a gold tooth’, to use a phrase he loved. He was a kind man, but racist, sexist and homophobic. Even for that part of the world he was anachronistic. A nasty divorce had left him with no car, so for a while he got around on his huge gelding, Hank, riding the back roads. When he did get a car, he drove very slowly. He’d begin trips by declaring: ‘And we’re off with the speed of a thousand startled turtles.’ I used to look forward to hearing his car cross the third grid, beginning those jamboree nights when Mum and I would sing country music with him in the kitchen. Roy inspired me, gave me shots of rum in my coffee, taught me to build fences and to connect with the landscape I lived in. He was good to me and for a few years I loved him; but after I left Mum’s, I totally ghosted him. What choice did I have? The facts of my life would have broken his heart.

  *

  When I was fourteen Mum kicked me out, to live in Wollongong with my father. When I was sixteen, I showed a Centrelink social worker my grades and convinced her it would be best for my father, his partner, my mother and me if my last two years of schooling were spent living alone. So I moved into the ground floor of a duplex under another family’s house. The roof was so low I couldn’t stand up, but there was space there, seclusion, to grow in new ways.

  Grades weren’t the issue. I graduated with a scholarship to study law and media at the University of New South Wales. Two years later I got a job as a journalist at New Matilda, on the environment beat. In December 2015 I covered the UN climate-change conference in Paris. The global response felt grimly absurd – I stood around with other journalists, negotiators and spectators, buying pre-poured, tin foil–capped wine in a converted aircraft hangar that felt like IKEA. I moved to Melbourne in July the next year.

  I started gardening at my rental in Preston, a listless search for life. I brought in a truckload of soil, a ute tray of manure, and scattered seeds. I got stoned and wandered around in the flamboyant satin robe that a friend made me. High, screeching at birds, scratching at mulch, pretending I knew what I was doing. Mostly, though, I stayed in bed. I rarely left home. I didn’t study or work. A good friend dubbed it my dark night of the soul. It was the time when I really started to grow up as a queer.

  The only spaces that enlivened me were the queer clubs, which, by their liminal nature, grant us permission; inhibition is shaken loose and with our movement we speak of community. There was restoration in this euphoria for me, but it was fleeting and could not endure the day. The flesh and beat of a club would whisk me to a humid peak, and often I’d bring someone home; but when they left, a terrible nothing would climb into my bed to lie with me for the rest of the day. If I got to the previous night’s dishes, I’d stare detachedly out the window and mark the progress of a noxious vine as it strangled our fence.

  The time at clubs cost money and I often ran out. One day I couldn’t make rent. I had to ask Mum. Dialling, I watched a bee dance with the violet flowers of the borage plants taking over the garden. I’d hardly asked anything of my parents since moving out years before. Since the days when we’d canter down straight stretches of flat road up Grady’s Creek, I’d barely spoken to Mum. She agreed to cover the rent so long as I went to see a psychologist.

  ‘Why don’t you come on this trip with me?’ Mum asked. She was going to Gundabooka National Park, near Bourke in inland New South Wales. ‘If you’re not doing anything, anyway. A change of scene might do you good.’

  When I got off the phone I checked the book I’d been reading – Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu. I wondered if the trip might take in the Ngunnhu, the Ngemba people’s fish traps on the Barwon River. You can still see them in Brewarrina. They’re thought to be the oldest enduring human constructions. I’d been ou
traged to learn how these marvels, about which we’re not taught at school, have been all but erased from the rivers. Yes, Mum would be going right past the traps at Bre. The next day I called to tell her I’d come.

  *

  Mum picks me up in her red Subaru and we exit by the looping roads at Gold Coast Airport. She’s not good at driving in cities. I give directions in what I hope is a patient voice, and feel panic rising. It’s just us two and the few hundred kilometres to Bourke, on the edge of the desert, where we will see the last of the wildflowers. There’s a lot of space for things to go wrong.

  We stop at a small-town cafe named after its owner, Narelle. The kind of place where big brekkies are huge and a large cap is a muggaccino. We sit on the deck, watching big rigs roll by. Mum chatters cheerfully, glad to be clear of the city. Narelle appears to take our order.

  ‘Mind if I smoke out here?’ I ask her, gesturing at the deck.

  ‘Fine,’ she says, heading inside.

  Then Mum starts. ‘Oh darling, please don’t—’

  ‘Trust me, Ma, it’s better for both of us—’

  ‘But not in front of me!’

  ‘Come on, you know I smoke . . . and you don’t want to deal with me in withdrawal.’

  This trip will be hard enough. We’ll be together all day, every day for a week, driving, walking, camping, talking – which hasn’t happened in at least five years. It’s the start and I’m already burnt to the filter.

  I’m exhausted from my time working at New Matilda. In the months after returning from Paris, I’d sit and smoke at the desk in my bedroom in Glebe, having given up on going into the office; drinking coffee like water and watching people pass by on the street with the feeling they were actors onscreen. Life narrowed down to this frame. I’d been so zealous before, so certain my witnessing mattered. In May 2016 I’d covered a blockade of coal ships at the Port of Newcastle and became infatuated with a dark, handsome boy. I’d pursued him to Melbourne, reported on the federal election, but resigned from New Matilda shortly thereafter. My romance had quickly gone stale and I’d done little since.