by Benjamin Law
*
If your body is different to other people’s, then by some weird logic they own it. They get the right to speak about it. I started school as a fat boy and that didn’t change. But in any other context than school, this would probably seem ridiculous. I look at photos of myself from high school and I don’t look fat at all. Just not athletic. I was obsessed with calories, and my weight, and eventually took up jogging. But I had to literally cake my emotions and anxiety with eating. I had my appendix removed in Year 10, but I don’t think I had appendicitis. I remember the week in hospital as a happy one, however, of running around the grounds in short pyjamas.
*
If I could live in a song, it wouldn’t be ‘Angie Baby’, which is kind of scary, or the cool, hard songs of the ’80s, but maybe the even more before-my-time Mary Wells’ ‘My Guy’ or Dusty Springfield’s ‘Son of a Preacher Man’. (And if there’s one lyric I’d like to unpack, it’s Nina Simone’s reference to ‘Liberace’s smile’ in ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’.) It’s 1983, the year of Eurythmics’ ‘Love Is a Stranger’. I’m eighteen, and the straight rites of passage mean nothing to me. I haven’t been to a nightclub; I haven’t read Barthes, or Stein, or Frank O’Hara; I haven’t kissed a boy.
Wanting
Fiona Wright
Even now, I sometimes think that I don’t know my own desire. I always close my eyes, I do not look, even as I feel my body held in another’s gaze. I read once somewhere that a woman’s desire is less visual, less dependent on what she looks at or sees, but I don’t trust the fact to be true.
What I do know is that I have three stories I tell myself about wanting, about desire: three of those strange beliefs we all have embedded in our brains that we’re often not aware of until something rubs against them. The first is this: you will not get what you want, so do not bother wanting. The second, closely related: if you want something too badly, you will not get it. The third: wanting is always better than having.
How is someone who believes these things ever going to allow herself an appetite?
*
As a child, I was always crushing on my school friends. I knew from a very young age that my desires weren’t usual. Perhaps both of these things are true of queer girls everywhere; perhaps we all have varying degrees of knowingness of what is happening. I didn’t have the words but I knew.
In Year 3 I held hands in the classroom with a long-limbed girl with long red hair; I kissed her hand, chastely, as we sat side by side on the dusty, carpeted floor. The teacher told me to stop. ‘I know we all love our friends,’ he said, ‘but still.’ I was chastised, and felt it keenly.
In Year 4 I, the smart kid, was asked to help the new girl with her reading, and we sat together in a light-filled room adjacent to our classroom, poring over large-format books aimed at children half our age. Eventually, we had a sleepover at her house, three cul-de-sacs away from mine. We shared a bath, and I was fascinated by her pubic hair, mousy brown despite the white-blonde hair on her head. We lay on air mattresses and wondered, with our voices and our jigsaw bodies, exactly how it was that lesbians had sex. She was cruel to me on a school excursion the next day, and I didn’t know what to do with the hurt and confusion.
In Year 5, a new school, and one of my classmates already had breasts. Beautiful, big breasts that I couldn’t help but look at. She caught me, rolled her eyes. She was eleven years old and already used to people staring. I was ten, and so ashamed.
In high school, there were three women: Lara, with her dark brown eyes and tangle of auburn curls; Sandra, with her long, slim limbs and boyish manner, her glossy black hair almost reaching her waist; and Katherine, crooked-grinned and effortlessly cool, who loved real lingerie and expensive make-up, who once made me promise I would tell her if I was ever crushing on her. I promised, even though I already was.
This was in our final year of high school, and Katherine and I swore that we’d stay friends, whatever happened, as we moved out into the world; we swore because we couldn’t bear – I mean this literally, it was physically painful – the thought that we might fall out of each other’s lives. Perhaps all teenage friendships are this intense, but I suspected mine were coloured differently than my friends’, and I had no way to act on this. Perhaps all teenagers feel this hurt and frustration, trying to find their place in a world they have not yet had the chance to shape or change. Perhaps they all want to be different. I was awful to all my friends’ boyfriends because the very fact of their existence always felt like a betrayal. I cut my hair short for my Year 12 formal, even though it didn’t suit me. I was trying to tell my parents something important. We all wanted to be different, but I still felt my difference keenly.
*
But even then, I knew this wasn’t everything. I knew this vaguely, as an unsettlement, but I never turned it over in my mind. In Year 10, I walked into a room of actors during my work-experience week in the costume department of a theatre school, where one of the actors, a man – I can’t remember anything about how he moved or looked – was standing in the doorway, and as I passed I caught the smell of him, baritone and musky, and I felt my body sharpen. I tried to explain this to my friend later that evening, but her dad was in the car and I felt exposed. This wasn’t the narrative I had of who I was, this wasn’t the person I, or any of my friends, expected me to be. I knew, but I didn’t have the words, and I pushed it from my mind.
*
It wasn’t long after I left school that I fell ill, and a different type of want, more insistent, more essential, began to dominate my days. I told a friend who I had a thing for at the time – rakish, exuberant and strawberry-blonde – that eating had been making me vomit lately, and she asked why, in that case, I was currently eating my lunch. It was lunchtime. Eventually, I stopped trying to eat at all.
When I think of this period, though, I don’t remember wanting. I don’t remember feeling hungry, just feeling time slow, feeling distracted, feeling spacey in the brain. I remember small aches in my body, but I mostly remember feeling fine – and my dogged insistence that everything was fine. The languor, the swooning pull of my body as it fatigued. I didn’t need desire to make my body feel alive. When I think of this time, I still catch myself, sometimes, thinking of it as a kind of innocence. I didn’t know how, precisely, I was sick. Sometimes I catch myself still wanting this, instead.
*
The first woman I slept with had green eyes and brown skin and had decided that she wanted me and was going to get what she desired. She said this, afterwards: ‘I always get what I want.’ She was one of those people who wear their sexuality like a cocktail dress, shimmying inside of it and letting the straps fall down the shoulder. Afterwards I fell asleep, and woke wondering if I had been transfigured (I hadn’t).
The second wouldn’t let me touch her in return.
The third took me back to her apartment on election night, at the end of the Howard era, when all of Newtown seemed to be on the street and dancing, and she gave me a pill and made me shower and kept asking, ‘How did I get you here?’ I walked to work at 5 am and everyone was buzzing, everyone seemed electric along their skin. Everyone had desired change, it seemed. Everyone had wanted this, and the relief, although short-lived, was wonderful.
The first time I slept with a man, it was also my first time overseas, and I kept thinking, before I flew there: no one will know me and I can be anyone and any way, without the weight of expectations, even my own.
I arrived after midnight, and fell straight into my guesthouse bed, and it felt like I woke in a brand-new world, the light dusty and gold, the soil red. This man showed me his city, kissed me on a beach one night, just out of reach of the lights of a bar with tables that sprawled out onto the sand, and I was surprised, until hindsight made it all make sense. He said, ‘Sometimes I don’t think I understand you,’ and I felt the shock of that, its risk, so quickly and so profoundly that I deflected, saying, ‘Sometimes I don’t think I understand myself,’ and so w
hatever else he was going to say was lost, is lost, forever. We drove around the city at night, parking on abandoned sports ovals or at the edges of farmland or jungle. The gearstick bruised my thigh. I pretended that I knew what I was doing, that none of this was startling, none of it new. I was so afraid. I was being anyone and any way, and I felt borderless. I buried myself deeper, hiding to keep safe.
*
I always knew, but I didn’t have the words. Years later, a boyfriend would say, ‘Wait, you moved to Newtown and then figured out you like dick?’ And I laughed but didn’t say that it wasn’t ever that simple. (He also said, in the same conversation, ‘But you’re not gay now because you’re with me.’) I didn’t say I had always doubted my absoluteness, the exclusive direction of my desire, but didn’t want to admit to this complexity, in case it diluted my difference, that one clear characteristic that I’d always felt able to claim. Usually, by then, I’d say, ‘I spent years trying to figure all of this out and it caused me a whole world of pain, so now I just say: “Whatever goes.”’
Because when I was growing up, queer was not included in the acronym. It had not yet been reclaimed by the people against whom it had, for years, been levelled as an insult. I don’t remember when and how I first came across it, only how well the word seemed to fit: it was, and is, a word without expectations, with undiluted difference, a word that can be everything and every way.
A word can be a wonderful thing. It can be a container. A mirror. It can click everything into place.
*
But wanting, wanting is still hard for me to bear. I still try to push it aside or power through it. I still catch myself, sometimes, equating it with weakness – because a person who wants nothing cannot be disappointed, cannot be harmed. It’s difficult instead to claim a thing that’s so long been denied. I keep messing things up as I muddle through, but at least I know now that wanting isn’t uncomplicated for anyone. I’m learning, however slowly and belatedly. And it helps, in no small part, to have the word.
Coming Out, Coming Home
Adolfo Aranjuez
You know how they say travel changes people? How being thrust into a foreign context inevitably forces you to reconsider what you find ‘right’ or ‘good’, and which parts of yourself you are comfortable with? Well, naff as it may sound, it’s true – at least in my experience. (Totally authoritative, relying on a significant sample size of one, but as they say: write what you know.)
I’m not talking about my trip to Japan in September 2016 – solo, after I’d broken up with a boyfriend who, shall we say, I had deemed lacking (but whose birthday present for me, in the form of a plane ticket, I decided to stay in a relationship with). Nor the incredibly portentous, but in the end rather pleasant, trip I made back to the Philippines, the motherland, over Christmas that same year (conservative Catholic family learns to embrace initially threatening queer boy with weird hair and tatts). Nor the fancy-as trip to Thailand in July 2018, all expenses forked out by the kingdom itself because I’m an impressive queer whose queer expertise is extensive enough to merit my presence at an LGBT+ conference (y’know, as the token Q in a sea of alabaster Gs).
No, I’m talking about the protracted, life-changing trip I made in 2003: to Australia as an international student. You could say being an international student is the ultimate form of travel. You’re visiting, but also kind of staying. You’re not just shedding the trappings of your usual life for several months tops; you’re changing core elements of your personality to adapt to an entirely new environment.
My parents wanted to ship me off, at fifteen, to a Western country because, as they put it, ‘There’s no future for someone so brilliant in the Philippines.’ To accomplish their goal, which we’ll call ‘The Plan’, they paraded me through various American cities – San Francisco, LA, Reno, Vegas; then to the east: New York, Richmond, DC, Jersey – in the hope that I’d fall for of one of those potential future homes. But I was (and remain) a picky bitch.
The Philippines-based Australian consul general (a tennis friend of my parents’ – which betrays my disgustingly privileged upbringing) tipped them off that international students in Australia could apply for permanent residence after two years in the country. This was true at that time, before immigration laws changed, so they swapped the Land of the Free for the Land Down Under. Sydney was in their sights – it was big, it was booming – but I got there and . . . no. Melbourne wasn’t even in their purview, which was weird because my Ate (older sister) was already there, completing her master’s. But life has a penchant for throwing curveballs: we detoured there to attend her wedding and, golly, was I bewitched by the place. Like most romances, it’s difficult to explain – something about the wide streets and leafy trees; the grey-white light of mid-morning; the temperamental rain and the smell of wet grass recalling Manila after a monsoon.
This is a sprawling origin story, I know. But the backdrop for the seismic disruption that was to occur in my life is important: the dislocation wasn’t only geographical – it was also about affect, culture, intent.
Back home, my life was pretty set-up. You may have guessed by now that I’m a huge overachiever, and that overachievement was in full flight by the time I migrated. I was on track to become the school paper’s editor-in-chief and graduate top of my class, while also kicking butt in choir, mathletics, cheerleading, the school council, and so on. Admittedly, I had no real friends, and my sense of self was entirely grounded in accomplishment. Plus, I felt my parents’ love was conditional on me bringing home another award or performing in another talent show, or two, or five. But this was my life. While I really did fall for Melbourne, my parents’ decision to extract me from my stable, streamlined Manila life, without my consent, was pretty fucked: I had to discard everything I’d built up to that point and start all over again.
*
My relationship with my birthplace is much the same as my relationship with my family: rocky, and replete with both affection and avoidance. I was my parents’ golden child – a trophy they could wave around at family reunions. Lots of passive-aggression and guilt-tripping were deployed to make me play piano or sing for relatives, even when I was shit-scared. And the compliments were often backhanded: but how come I ‘only’ got second prize in that last school competition? Until early adolescence, I was obedient and hardly spoke up at all – the consummate child for the traditional Asian family, for whom kids should be seen, not heard.
I loved school, though. There, I felt an immense sense of mastery over my life; I did what I wanted, worked hard and got results. I suppose this engendered a fabricated sense of belonging or purpose, compared to my stifled silence at home; it was at school that I could be myself.
High school is infamous for being a pressure cooker of hormones and emotions and existential crises: Who am I? What do I want to be when I grow up? Why does this pimple keep reappearing on my chin? But being booted off to another country by your own parents, who have the gall to not move there with you (Ate took on de facto parenting duties, bless her – apparently she felt responsible for me because it was by her request that I was conceived in the first place) certainly intensified things for me. And it really was tough: the increased independence, coupled with Australia’s secularism, led me to question and soon abandon my faith. My mental-health issues also made themselves felt around this time – I developed anorexia and did some self-harming, with the first blushes of yet-to-be-diagnosed bipolar and anxiety soon to follow. Geographical distance catalysed an increasing emotional rift between me and my parents, and the more I came of age, the more the chasm between us – which had always been there, seething beneath the surface of ceremony and courtesy and my striving to be the perfect child – solidified.
You could say my parents really messed up by sending me to live in a liberal Western country: in Australia, their silent, servile child couldn’t stay silent or servile for long. Then again, they’d messed up earlier than that by sending me to a cosmopolitan, English-speaking
, super-prestigious inner-city private school whose corridors have been graced by the offspring of celebrities, diplomats, media figures, artists, sportspeople and expats. In both cases, I know my parents were doing the best they could. It’s said that we inevitably regurgitate the parenting styles we’re exposed to, and the world was very, very different in their youths – though Mom grew up rich and Dad working-class, both were similarly expected to be deferential and defined by their achievements. Perhaps they just miscalculated, with my rigorous education breeding in me a rebellious philosopher instead of a hyper-qualified follower.
Thankfully, school in Melbourne offered sanctuary once again. By the end of Term 1, I’d re-established my overachiever status: four school bands, the school play, school council, yearbook editor, debating team, accelerated-learning program, A+ average. On top of that, I’d achieved something I never had before: I actually made friends. Within six months I’d even come out to the whole school and, two months later, I had a boyfriend (who, seven months later, would cheat on me on a school trip to Paris – but that is an essay for another time, likely a confessional one on anxious-attached dating styles).
Another naff trope we all know and love (to hate) is the ‘bumpy coming-out’ episode, and mine, shamefully, matched this trope to a T. Everyone in my family always sort of knew, but it was at the six-months-in-Melbourne mark that I made it official: first to my sister, then my mother and, finally, my father. Dad reportedly didn’t eat properly for a month afterwards, and I discovered later that he’d grovelled to Ate’s then-husband, begging him to teach me to ‘be a man’. I thought my mother was on side, but Ate soon clued me in to Mom’s secret whispers of longing that I would one day ‘just find a wife’ so that I could ‘give her grandkids and not be lonely’.
