Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  LGBTI-Q&A:

  Georgie Stone

  Actor and transgender rights advocate

  Benjamin Law: Your immediate family includes a mum, a dad, a son – your twin brother, Harry – and you, a daughter. When did your parents discover they had a son and a daughter?

  Georgie Stone: It was different times for both of them. I first told Mum that I was a girl when I was two and a half years old – very young.

  That’s so young. Do you even remember telling her?

  It’s sort of my earliest memory. I just remember having watched the movie Cinderella – the Disney animation – I turned to Mum and was like, ‘I’m a girl, just like Cinderella.’ I was so young, she would’ve thought, ‘Oh, it’s a phase; experimenting and exploring.’ But it was about the age of four or five, when I was in kindergarten, I really wanted to dress up in the dresses. But I was conscious people would find that weird, and I was getting quite distressed about it. I kept telling my parents, ‘I’m a girl, I’m a girl.’ That’s when Mum thought, ‘Oh, this is more than what we thought it would be,’ but Dad was like, ‘No, just don’t think about it; it’s alright.’ Apparently, both of them were praying to God that I would end up gay, not trans.

  Oh, that’s interesting. Why?

  When Mum was twenty, she was going to rallies – she’s from Tasmania – for being gay to be decriminalised. But in terms of trans people, she didn’t know much, and there was no representation of trans kids. She thought that if I was trans, I’d have a very bleak life. It was when I was around five when Mum thought I was actually female. For Dad, it was seven or eight, because I started to become quite suicidal. He realised that the best way to support me wasn’t to stop me [from being a girl], but to listen to me and accept me for who I am.

  To be suicidal at eight is really serious. What happened?

  It was really in school. I was made to use the male toilets, wear the male uniform, have short hair. I felt very, very restricted. It was getting to the point, when I was seven, when I thought enough is enough, I can’t keep doing this. What helped me out of that dark period was Mum. She was looking on the internet for help and, after a long time searching, she finally found Dr Campbell Paul at the Royal Children’s Hospital – the only person she could find who was working with trans kids. That was in 2007. I ended up being the third trans kid he met with.

  It’s one thing to be trans. It’s another thing to publicly advocate for trans rights and issues. You’ve appeared on TV a lot: Four Corners, Australian Story and The Project. Why was it important to you – even as you were still growing up – to tell your story publicly?

  It definitely wasn’t something I wanted to do all my life. For a long time I just thought, ‘Okay, I’m a girl, but I’m just not going to talk about it. No one needs to know.’ I liked the feeling of being taken at face value. Then when I was fourteen, I came out to my friends and they were so accepting of me. I started to see that the world was different to what I thought it was; that there was more acceptance than I thought there was. So then I thought, ‘Okay, I don’t care who knows.’ I felt like I had an obligation: there are so many young trans people who are so isolated, and feel so alone, and in that really bleak space, who can’t do anything or feel they can’t speak up. I’m supported by my family, I have the resources, I have – I suppose – the privilege to do it. I experience privilege as a white person, as an able-bodied person. So I thought, ‘I’m in this position where I actually can make a difference.’ And I felt like I should. We need that positive representation.

  When you share your story publicly, what are the reactions that you get from people? What reactions have surprised you?

  What’s surprising is that the people you think would be supportive are often not – or are a bit ignorant. For example, I’ve never met her before, but J.K. Rowling is someone I looked up to my whole life, and it turns out she’s a bit transphobic. She’s very progressive – and she’s supportive of the gay community to an extent – but in terms of trans people, not so much. It disappointed me because I was such a massive Harry Potter fan. And then, some people have called in on talkback radio from outback Australia who’ve been very supportive. So, support can come from very unexpected places. I’ve found that the majority of the time, there has been support, or at least people have been willing to have an open mind and listen. That said, I get attacked sometimes on Twitter. After I won Victorian Young Australian of the Year, there was so much hatred, and that was actually a bit hard to watch. Usually I’ve been able to brush stuff off, but they’d organised themselves, so there were heaps of people who were really up in arms about it.

  Are there also other ways in which transphobia can manifest, rather than the ways that are probably more obvious to people?

  Two weeks ago – on my first day of uni – I was in a lecture and the lecturer went off on a tangent about how there was a push in Japan against the restrictive traditional way people dress, especially when going for jobs. Then she said, ‘Women want to wear pants and men want to wear dresses, so there’s a push for transgender people.’ I was thinking, ‘That’s a bit stupid,’ because trans people aren’t men in dresses. I’m not a man in a dress; I’m a woman. She wasn’t against trans people, it was just ignorant. Another one is people saying, ‘I don’t see gender’ – which, firstly, I think is bullshit, because it comes from someone who isn’t non-binary. And it disregards the trauma a lot of trans and gender-diverse people feel. If you say you don’t see gender, you’re also refusing to look at the transphobia that we face, and you’re refusing to acknowledge our gender identity as well.

  What are the things you’d be happy never to talk about again when it comes to transgender issues?

  One thing I do get asked about way too much – and it is actually quite disrespectful – is my genitalia. For some reason, complete strangers feel like it’s appropriate to ask a trans person whether they have a penis or not. I got that at a function when I was sixteen, by this old, white person, and I felt really uncomfortable.

  It’s like: in what other situation would a grown adult ask a sixteen-year-old about their genitals? Or anyone?

  I was almost tempted to ask, ‘Well, what do you have?’ I didn’t, obviously, but it was really yuck. And it happens a lot. People feel like they have the right to ask trans people that.

  Do you have a strategy for when you get that question? Especially for young trans people, have you found a best practice for responding?

  I’m a bit of a people pleaser. If someone asks me that I’ll try and go, ‘Oh no, it’s alright. You didn’t know. It’s okay.’ But honestly, don’t feel like you have to make them feel right. Don’t feel like you have to answer that. Don’t apologise. Don’t feel like you have to explain yourself. You absolutely have the right to say, ‘No, I don’t want to answer that. That is disrespectful.’ You can educate them by doing that. So I’m perfectly happy to not answer that question ever again, and for people to not ask that.

  What conversations should we be having more about and with transgender people?

  How to be a good ally.

  What constitutes being a good ally of trans people, for you?

  Learn the pronouns. It’s good to ask questions about this; don’t feel embarrassed. Like: ‘What pronouns do you want me to use?’ and ‘What do you feel comfortable with?’ Then listen. Really just listen to what they have to say.

  LGBTI-Q&A:

  Tony Ayres

  Screenwriter, showrunner and director

  Benjamin Law: Where and when were you born and where did you grow up?

  Tony Ayres: I was born in Macau in 1961; we came to Australia in 1964. I kind of grew up in Melbourne, then when I was eleven I went to Perth with my sister and mother. That’s probably where I first realised I was gay and where I came out.

  Do you remember your first crush?

  The very first clear crush I had was in high school. I would have been about fourteen. It was a boy I was just madly in love with.

&
nbsp; Describe him for me.

  His name was Michael. He was a basketballer and I was a nerdy, academic chess-player – the cliché of the Asian student.

  Whereas he was the classic hot jock?

  Yeah, but he had this other part of him which was a little bit unknowable and he was a bit of a loner. He actually became my best friend. But I knew I was in love with him because whenever it was recess or lunchtime, I would look from the classroom into the rectangle to see whether he was there or not. [Laughs] I basically stalked him.

  Were you equipped with the vocabulary for what you were feeling?

  Well, I was reading a lot of D.H. Lawrence then, so I did have a vocabulary, but it was all very tortured and kind of Freudian. I was also listening to a lot of Joni Mitchell, so I had another sort of vocabulary – also very tortured.

  [Laughs] You were such a sensitive boy.

  In my first year at university, I went away to Canberra. Just before I left, I wrote him a letter saying what I felt for him. I basically told him I was in love with him. He never responded.

  Oh. Was that devastating?

  I guess it was. But you know, I’d also discovered beats and saunas then, so I had lots of distractions.

  You soothed yourself with the ancient remedy of cock.

  [Laughs] The weird irony is that the year after, when I was seventeen and at university, I met the next man I fell in love with, whose name was also Michael.

  [Laughs] You’ve got a Michael complex. When you were first becoming cogniscent of your sexuality, what was the social conversation around you at the time when it came to homosexuality?

  Homosexuality was never discussed. I went to high school in Western Australia. My best friend was an Indian guy called Bobby and my other great friend was a guy called Steven, who used to star in all the school musicals. In subsequent years, I discovered both of them were gay, but we never talked about anything even remotely gay.

  But you were on the same frequency.

  Somehow we were attracted to each other, but it was never raised. I’m not conscious of anything overtly homophobic from those years. It was just an invisible topic. And maybe we avoided it because it was too close to the bone . . . too closer to the boner.

  Tell me about your coming out.

  I became an orphan young, so I wasn’t dealing with family expectations – which, I think, particularly for a lot of people from Asian backgrounds, is such a big thing. Whereas I had no one to come out to.

  So your letter to Michael was your first coming out?

  No, my first coming-out experience was to my history teacher.

  How old were you?

  I was sixteen. It was my final year at high school. I was living with him and his wife and two kids at that stage, because I was an orphan, and he took me under his wing. I just very nervously said to him one night, ‘Oh, I’m gay.’ He was a sort of progressive straight guy who was trying to show me that it was all okay. He said, ‘Oh, okay. Well, let’s celebrate,’ and took me to an illegal casino and we gambled. Because I was coming out to him as something illegal, he was showing me his world.

  Showing you something illicit too.

  It was just a strange night, but he accepted me and I told his wife. Then I told my sister. She and I went on this driving tour through New Zealand. The first thing she did was get up, burst into tears and run away down a track. She came back about ten minutes later and said, ‘I don’t know how to respond.’ Then after that, it was just kind of fine.

  Have you ever had hostile experiences when it’s come to your sexuality?

  I guess when you’re walking along the street and you’re holding hands with someone at Mardi Gras, someone will shout out of a car. But it means nothing to me.

  I guess you’ve built yourself on that bedrock of having everyone okay with it.

  The most difficult thing that I had to face, in terms of my sexuality, was that it was my first real experience of racism. That was the headfuck for me. Originally I thought, ‘No one around me is upset about it, so I’ll just walk into this gay world where I’ll be accepted by all these other men and have a friendship circle.’ I kind of went bang into this brick wall where suddenly I wasn’t a gay man; I was a Chinese gay man.

  You come into this other minority world and encounter – how would you describe it? Exclusion?

  Racism only hurts when you actually want to be a part of something. I remember going to this gay bar in Canberra and being really nervous and excited and cycling there. I sat down in the bar, bought myself a beer and looked around. Over two hours, no one would look at me, no one would talk to me. The only people who ended up being nice to me were the drag queens. Who were hilarious! But I just felt that I was not a part of something.

  Which makes you question your worth and attractiveness; all of that stuff.

  At a time when you’re trying to come to terms with who you are and your own sense of who you are within the world, you’re constantly second-guessing. ‘Oh, did that person not like me because of who I am, or did that person just categorically not like me?’ All of those questions were very undermining. Coming out was both coming out as being gay and coming out as being gay and Chinese. Those two things can’t be separated. They cannot be untangled from my experience of the gay world. It’s a complicated issue because nothing triggers gay men more than the accusation that they’re racist.

  Yes. ‘How dare you! I’m homosexual, I’m already oppressed, I can’t oppress others!’

  And also: ‘You can’t tell me who I should and shouldn’t be attracted to! I’ve fought my whole life for the right to be attracted to who I want.’ You can’t be critical of that. And of course, you’re not going to force people to sleep with you if they don’t want to sleep with you.

  But if you’re saying someone is unattractive solely on the basis of their race – in a sexual context or otherwise – that has to be fundamentally racist.

  I agree with that. But I sort of feel like in a way we need to reframe the argument. Desire is racialised for some men. Not for all men but for some men. And there are cultural institutions that reinforce those things. And the more that we can try to break down those things – like even representations of what is attractive – then maybe the rigid barriers we put around race and desire will also start to become more porous. When I was growing up, even I had that feeling: ‘I don’t find other Asian men attractive.’ But that changed when I went on this long trip to China and found myself surrounded by other Asian men. They stopped being Asian men and they started just being men.

  Same thing happened for me. I told myself I didn’t find Asian men attractive. Then I spent months in Japan. And of course you’re just surrounded by attractive Asian men, and new images of beauty.

  It makes you realise we are all affected by culture. For me, the questions about sexuality and coming out are deeply entangled with racial questions.

  If you could go back in time to those mid-teen years and give young Tony a pep talk or advice, what would you say?

  I would just say, ‘You’re going to get through this.’ Now I feel completely blessed. Michael and I are having our fortieth anniversary this year and we’ve been together all this time. We’ve had ups and downs – and ins and outs [Laughs] – but we’re at the point in our lives where we are both so deeply grateful to still have each other. To still feel for each other the way that we do, I feel like I’m blessed.

  LGBTI-Q&A:

  Sally Rugg

  Executive director at Change.org Australia

  Benjamin Law: When did you first think you were different to the heterosexual kids around you?

  Sally Rugg: When I realised I was gay, I was about nineteen. It was honestly like this penny-drop moment, where all of a sudden everything made sense. All this information about myself – all these memories and feelings – suddenly crystallised. Retrospectively, it’s like, ‘Oh my god, of course.’ But I didn’t know. I was having sex with women and didn’t . . .

  Put two and two to
gether?!

  No!

  You were already having sex with women, so why hadn’t it already crystallised in your mind?

  Partly denial. And everybody was doing it. My friends at school – I went to an all-girls school – were all making out with each other at parties in front of boys, which was my favourite thing to do.

  But the others were doing it in a more performative way?

  Definitely. But also I can imagine they were exploring their sexualities as well.

  But you were going all the way.

  But always with their boyfriends, never just one-on-one. So that also felt risqué.

  What changed at nineteen?

  I had a crush on a girl in a way that was different to anything before. I couldn’t get this person out of my head. I would go to sleep thinking about this girl. I remember driving down Stirling Highway in Perth and it clicked in my head, this sudden realisation. I had an autonomic response to this realisation. And it felt like realising I had cancer.

  Gee. How so?

  I was driving and crying, because all of a sudden there was a thing inside me. I didn’t choose it, I couldn’t get rid of it, I couldn’t control it.

  Where do you think you got that negativity from, in terms of how you saw gayness and queerness?

  I remember feeling the world was going to be hostile towards me. I’d always been really ambitious and wanted to do big things. All of a sudden, I was realising it was going to be much harder for me if I came out, because the world is hostile to gay people. I didn’t know any gay people growing up. The first time I heard about gayness was when I learnt it as a slur, and that slur was used against me in high school. All my friends in high school suspected I was gay. [Laughs] They called it. I got called ‘Rugg-muncher’ in high school.