Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  I arrive at school and buy my third coffee for the day from the tuckshop on the way to my locker. I didn’t really sleep much last night because I stayed up chatting with L.

  My locker stinks of old tuna cans from whomever was using it last year, so I have to hold my breath when I open it. I grab my books for periods one and two. As I turn, W shoulders me into my open locker. My elbow bangs hard into the rusty edge of the locker door. Puberty has hit W hard since last semester and he has tripled is size and greasiness. He tells me to watch where I’m going and then ‘books’ me. ‘Booking’ is a school-wide phenomenon where a victim’s books are swatted out of their arms as hard as possible. Precautionary measures such as holding your books across your chest with your arms folded tightly only makes you a more highly sought-after target. Anyone who displays signs of fragility or femininity is attacked. Those are the rules.

  ‘Fuck off!’ I say as I bend over to pick up my books.

  W snorts and pushes me over like I’m made of paper.

  ‘What’s wrong, Daisy? Got your period or something?’

  I don’t say anything. He’s laughing.

  ‘Look! You’re bleeding! See, Daisy’s on her rags!’

  Blood drips down my leg and onto my books. The stinky old locker must have cut my elbow. I feel sick.

  I’m late to class because the closest toilet block is back by the tuckshop, and I walk into first period clutching toilet paper to my elbow to stop the bleeding. F waves me over to sit with him in the back row. During rollcall he tells me about his plans to fuck S with the big tits at this party on the weekend, without asking me about my arm or inviting me. I often find myself befriending boys like this: tall, strong, rebel types who want someone to be protective of. F is a boarder, but unlike most of the others his parents don’t live in the country or overseas; they’re just too busy earning money to be bothered dealing with him during the week, I guess. He is a spoilt drunk and a compulsive liar, but he is nice to me. Years later he will run into me on the street outside a bar in the Valley, shirt torn open, prematurely balding, coked up and sweaty, and he will hug me fondly. Now he tells me about a gang fight he saw in a park that he’s probably making up. I wonder if I’ll ever have big tits like S, but it seems unlikely.

  *

  Art is the only class where I feel respected at all. Even the too-cool jocks will stop by my easel on their way to wash their brushes to compliment my paintings. This is the only class I like besides English and Ancient History. The teacher lets us play our own music while we work and A, who often sits at my table, always tries to play emo music to piss off the TCs. Today I’m painting a portrait of an actor I’m currently obsessed with. A TC comes up behind me.

  ‘She’s hot. Is that your girlfriend?’

  I tell him she’s an actor.

  ‘Dope,’ he says.

  I don’t tell him how much I wish I looked like her. After graduating I will go to art school for two years, where I will have my first major manic episode.

  During lunch I sit with T, the only out gay kid in my year. He wears Doc Martens to school. The TCs call him ‘Nazi fag’ with no sense of irony. I ask him if he hates it here as much as I do, and he tells me it’s a lot better than his last school. I don’t normally sit with anyone in particular. F usually spends lunchtimes playing video games in the boarding house. Sometimes I go to the art block. Other times I just walk around, listening to music. T asks me if I’m going to eat anything and I tell him I feel sick. Even though we don’t really know each other, we will catch up in a few years, when he is performing cabaret and experimental theatre and I’m studying creative writing. I open my lunch box and take a bite of a sour apple.

  After school I have basketball practice, but first I meet some of the boys from the team at Subway to gulp energy drinks and smoke cigarettes in the car park. I’m feeling a bit faint by now, so I buy a triple choc chip cookie. G gives me one of his cigarettes and then offers me his Lynx to cover up the smell before practice.

  I’m the shortest person on the team and my lungs sting as I sprint up and down the court.

  ‘Alright, ladies!’ the coach yells when a few of the boys start to lag.

  ‘Come on, Daisy!’

  In the change room I feel like throwing up. Everyone on the team is white except me. G says I’m cool though, because I’m mixed, ‘not full Asian’. I’m the only ‘ranga Asian’ he knows, he tells me. There are only communal showers, so I just wash my face in the sink.

  My dad is waiting in his car to pick me up. We don’t talk much on the drive home, but we haven’t talked much for a while. Ever since he walked in on me losing my virginity, things have been a bit weird. In the ’80s, he worked in an AIDS ward and I won’t realise for a long time that his love of rules – making and following them – stems from anxiety. I’ll waste a lot of time being angry with him. He asks me if I have much homework and I tell him I’m going to see C after dinner. He tells me I have to be home early because I have school tomorrow.

  *

  I met C online. She lives a few suburbs out from mine and her mum drives us to Blockbuster to rent some movies and buy snacks. C is tall, thin and white, and has big blue eyes. I never know if I’m dying to kiss her or to be her. I just know there’s something painful about being around her. We did kiss once, but we were really drunk at the house party of a boy she was sleeping with. We never talk about it, but we have been hanging out ever since.

  In her room we lie on the mattress with a floor fan pointed at our faces and eat sour gummy worms. We watch Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, a movie co-written by and starring Jim Carrey, which culminates in the reveal that the villain is trans. Jim tears off her clothes in front of a group of cops and they’re all disgusted because they believe they’ve all been kissing ‘a man pretending to be a woman’.

  After the movie C and I walk around the park talking about music. She’s shy but a good listener. We will soon drift apart when things get complicated with her boyfriend. In ten years’ time she will message me to say that she’s proud of me.

  When I return home, I get into bed with my laptop to find I have a bunch of missed messages from L.

  hey girl where u been?

  I take off my jeans and shirt and change into a singlet and some nicer undies.

  hi;)

  He wants to video chat so I throw a thin scarf over my bedside lamp for mood lighting and tousle my hair so that it covers my forehead. I turn on my webcam.

  u look sxc as heck tonight!

  I smile. yeah?

  fuck yeh

  I pose for him, twisting my body carefully.

  what do you feel like doing, baby? I want to fuck ur sweet arse so bad!!!

  I laugh. He asks if I’m laughing at him, he tells me he missed me. He doesn’t want any foreplay tonight. I do what he tells me to do, watching myself in the grainy little chat window. For a moment I think about taking some screenshots but decide against it. I look good in this light. I could be a real girl.

  When he’s done he sends me a photo of himself and tells me his fish girlfriend doesn’t make him cum like that. He says he wants to meet in person but that he can’t. He thinks it’s safer here. I tell him I’m tired; I have to be up for school in a few hours. Later that year I’ll run into him on the bus and he’ll ignore me.

  I close my computer and go wash my hands, tiptoeing down the hall so as not to wake my parents or siblings. The bathroom light always flickers a few times before coming on, like in a horror movie. In the mirror I see a boy. He looks sad.

  Back in bed, I wish that I’ll wake up and be an entirely different person. I finger the self-harm scars on my body, imagining them opening and closing like gills. Blood pours from them, emptying from the shell that I live in.

  *

  Things will get a lot worse before they get better. It will be ten years before I come out and begin hormone replacement therapy. I will visit my parents and they will be trying their best. My mum will be sad about my name but say sorr
y for sending me to a boys’ school, and I will tell her it doesn’t matter now. My dad will ask me about my medications and whether I’ve been exercising enough, which I will know means he worries about me and loves me. My fiancée will squeeze my thigh when I’m being too sensitive or defensive. Mum will tell them how she made me a fairy costume when I was three out of a coathanger and a pair of hot-pink tights, how she got me a Barbie because I asked for one, and how I was always very quiet and observant and questioning.

  ‘You haven’t changed at all,’ she will say.

  Living in a Fridge

  Michael Farrell

  When I think about the idea of growing up, it makes me wonder if the conditions of queer adulthood are possible – or even desirable. The notion of adulthood seems so enmeshed with heterosexuality. It also makes me think of Paul McCartney’s ‘Coming Up’: ‘like a flower’, to bloom, to be plucked, or mowed. Mightn’t it be better to remain a bud, full of potential, a seedling?

  Ways of being queer are ways of being human, but being human can feel limited sometimes. Poetry helps me think metaphorically of how I was trained, like a vine, to grow and flower in certain directions. A human child is closed off from the adult world in many ways, and as much as I might have wanted to join it, I thought more about joining the animal world. The cattle-farming world, the bush world. I still have a residue of this, a deeper sense, in fact, of relation to Melbourne birds; to kangaroos, in statue or poem; I look out for them in a roadside mob.

  *

  After my first attempt at writing this, I realised I hadn’t mentioned that staple of gay memoir: religion, growing up (predictably) Catholic. But I don’t think of the rituals, hymns or altar-boy smocks, or of naked Christ on the cross; the only abuse I suffered was from a priest’s knuckle to the head once, and from the nuns’ ‘dark sarcasm / in the classroom’ (Pink Floyd). What I think of is truth. The rite of confession did, I think, influence me strongly. I haven’t always been a completely honest person; I confess that the truth doesn’t always seem personally honest – or kind – but I find social lies and performance difficult. And growing up queer means, for me anyway, growing up secretive. I am structured like a nut, in the hard-to-get-at-the-seed sense.

  *

  It’s a slow process, finding out how other people live, when you’ve grown up in a small country town. I think that observing animal life broadened that perception, however – and reading books. In an unlikely sense, Henry VIII, whose life I stumbled on in the school library, was a liberating example: he wasn’t constrained by marriage or the Catholic Church. Just like the Protestant side of my own family (no beheadings, however).

  *

  As the concept of queer, and attitudes towards gender, gets more diverse, the way we understand and tell our growing-up stories gets more diverse. Ten years ago, I would probably have written this as a fairly standard growing-up-gay-in-the-country story. This is not so different, perhaps, but back then the emphases would have been identified in a more positive way, the non-normative aspects would have been presented as badges of being gay. As if I was struggling towards something recognisable, rather than being something that was in itself interesting.

  *

  I like how vague ‘non-normative’ sounds; it’s like a category of ambient music. Growing up non-normative . . . it sounds like it would be hard to be abused in those terms. But back then, the word ‘abnormal’ had a fair amount of derogatory power. (Still does in some playgrounds, no doubt.) Growing up how I was meant a lot of hiding and a lot of insults (how much is a lot?) and a lot of hating (inside me). It meant not wanting to have a body at all. Which meant never wanting to play football or do PE, and never using the boys’ toilets in six years of high school. I put all my energy into being invisible. Which probably made it harder for me to perform visibility later on.

  *

  What do I wish I’d known then? That there were other gay boys at school, even in my small class. But perhaps they didn’t know what they were going to be either. Hill towns before the internet were like living in a fridge with the door closed but the light on.

  *

  ‘Does Your Mother Know?’ (ABBA). I remember my brother being appalled that I liked the ’80s singer Marilyn. I still like that type: fey but tough, skinny and pretty. I was probably more attracted to Andy Gibb, but I was too young then to feel much about it. I recently saw the documentary Paris Is Burning, about queer Harlem ball competitions: a world to desire (the romantic highlights of the movie, the competitions, not the everyday reality of the performers’ lives). One thing that interested me was the judging of the competitors on their ‘realness’: not acting or copying, but realness. I perform poetry. But I’ve never been much of a performer of straightness, or perhaps I should say of gender. Except by default. I can grow a beard; I have a deep voice.

  *

  Pop music was like an oxygen tank, aural ice-cream. But now I’m trying to think, what were the queer songs? Something like Helen Reddy’s ‘Angie Baby’ rather than Marilyn’s ‘Calling Your Name’. ‘Walking on Thin Ice’ and ‘O Superman’ were pretty queer too, but that was later. I’d almost survived by then (like there was only one round). I had no concept of art yet, let alone the avant-garde. Australians must have changed (surely?) in the ’70s while ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was number one. Imagine Gough singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in the shower. Imagine the governor-general. I sang ‘Somebody to Love’ under the noise of the lawnmower, but I imagine straight boys did this also. I really just want to keep naming songs. They’re signs of happiness (and loneliness). Songs and the bush.

  *

  Growing up non-heteronormative means growing up double. Growing up as what you’re not, as well as what you are. That sounds a bit essentialist, I know. Every secretive act of the past becomes an analogy for sexuality. I would make up what I might now call ‘image families’. I was no Brontë, with a shared secret world; I couldn’t imagine sharing my secret worlds with my brothers and sisters. I thought constantly of the cows on the farm, of the chooks at my grandparents’. I had my own plastic animals to play with. But I still needed to create more families: with grass (from seed heads), broken pegs (wooden ones, grouped into two different types: those with and those without a head), buttons and plastic counters. These were found families. I don’t think the worlds I created were very elaborate. I can’t remember if I even made up dialogue. I think the structures, and to some extent the naming, were what interested me. I was curious about family trees and the possibilities of instability (and change and complication) when it came to marrying. Something I couldn’t imagine myself doing.

  *

  I had a vague sense of masochism from dreams of barbed wire, and stories of wounded princes (which I would dress up as). I thought having a harem, or what I later learnt was called promiscuity, was the ideal: learnt from the animals on our farm. I could identify with bulls more than with men. I could imagine sex with cows, although I didn’t imagine it as a literal act (despite having seen it between cows many times). I imagined that cows were my girlfriends, and innocently told someone at school. Shamed again. I demonstrated for my cousin a very perfunctory servicing, perhaps with a pillow, which my grandmother walked in on. She knew instantly it was something we shouldn’t be doing, although we were probably ten at the most, and not naked or touching each other. I suspect such fantasies are not so abnormal for farm boys. Generally, I felt I could do what I liked, I think, whether it was French knitting or having my own flower garden, but even these were to some extent secret activities. (We were not a very social family.) I could do them, but I couldn’t, ultimately, do them and be considered normal. In small towns, there’s a lot of pressure and anxiety around being normal, but on farms no one cares about their neighbours most of the time. Or maybe that was just us.

  *

  I can’t separate growing up queer from growing up as a poet. I could see correspondences with my own life in the biographies of John Ashbery and Les Murray. Not only the farm experienc
e, but the sense of having access to a present that is considered history to other people. That sense is partly due to growing up in a pre-internet rural environment, but also due to having young grandparents. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents when I was growing up; their stories were of the past, and we drove through the places of that past, where they used to live, where the people they used to know used to live and sometimes still did, miles from town life, in the bush.

  *

  As long as I had a hat and a waddy to fend off snakes, I could wander wherever I liked: into the bush, or to the river, or on parts of the cleared land of the farm. I had vague fantasies, as I grew older, of meeting a man, maybe a naked man, in the bush. There were naked children nearby – we saw them on the side of the road: the ‘hippy’ kids. This was kind of titillating, but not erotic for me.

  *

  ‘What is the point of being a little boy if you grow up to be a man?’ (Gertrude Stein). I never saw the point of gender division at school, just as I never saw the point of being ‘Master’ or, later, ‘Mister’. Boys who didn’t want to play with boys got shamed by the girls, even if the other boys didn’t care. By high school they did care, though. Friendship with a girl meant her boyfriend threatening to beat me up. I had crushes on a couple of the boys in my year, and I hadn’t completely left masochism behind either, but there was not a lot of affection going around.