by Benjamin Law
I’d anticipated this antipathy. Identity in the Philippine context is heavily premised on communalism: anything said about you is said about your family. So there’s a lot of pressure to blend in, to be ‘respectable’, to do things ‘right’. While the Philippines is broadly accepting of queerness, thanks in part to pre-colonial conceptions of gender that transcend the binary (bakla, an expansive term that lacks a true English counterpart, for instance, tends to be translated to ‘gay’ even if it spans a range of identities across the Western gender and orientation spectrums), this acceptance is complicated by class and status. In my case, bourgeois Manila society would have frowned upon me identifying as, not to mention performing the identity of, a bakla. Homonormativity – that desire to ‘pass’ as a member of the majority, to appear straight-adjacent and conservative-approximate – permeates everyday life, so queerness is reined in through play-acting what a ‘normal’ cisgender, heteronormative person would deem palatable. And this isn’t even to broach the still deeply-rooted influence of the Catholic Church, which literally demonises queerness.
*
One of the first things I learnt in Australia was the phrase ‘She’ll be right.’ It wasn’t clear to me who the mysterious ‘she’ was, but the sentiment quickly piqued my curiosity and captured my imagination. More than just a stock saying, ‘She’ll be right’ is a philosophy for life, a mode of being in the world. This optimistic phrase encapsulates Australia’s predominant laidback ethos – informed, arguably, by centuries of serendipitous luck (what country just strikes gold?), isolation and relative safety from invaders (the irony!), and vast expanses of land and resources. It embodies a stoic attitude towards hardship as well – one that conflicted with my overachieving life, which had always been about pushing against, pushing away, pushing and pushing until everything was ‘fixed’ and my body and brain had reached their limit.
The prevailing migrant narrative is one of always doing more than expected, to the point of effacing yourself. And this is heritable: speaking anecdotally, I’ve found that second- and third-generation migrant folks exemplify this in their often-stereotyped, but nevertheless observable, work ethic, their frugality, their success. Privilege aside, self-effacement was key to my own upbringing. Growing up in the context that I did, I consciously amassed tools with which to dodge unpleasant situations, suck it up, shut up and put on the best face. Why wasn’t I like all the other boys? Why couldn’t I just do what Tita (aunty) asked one more time? Why didn’t I have a girlfriend? Little did I know that, in Australia, this crafty resilience would serve me well – as a queer person.
Coming out, like moving countries, is a journey: you’ve got a target destination, even if the direction you take to get there isn’t all that clear. At the same time that you labour, pushing feet against pavement, you also have to let the road take you where it leads. You both know and don’t know what you’re doing, so you have to settle in – and surrender – to the movement. I took heart in the Aussie brand of Zen. Divorced from familial expectations and the familiar context of Philippine Catholic conservatism, I had to not only grow up pretty damn quickly, but also learn to embrace my distinctive tribulations. The completely unnatural upheaval that coincided with puberty forced me to really think about who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life: not just to keep kicking butt at school, at work and in relationships, but also, ultimately, to be happy.
There are things you can fix and things you file away or feel your way through because they ‘become right’ in their own time. In two years, I’d finished high school (graduating dux, of course), applied for another student visa, finished uni (with a high distinction average), applied for temporary residence, almost got deported but managed to secure permanent residence. Ten years after first immigrating to Melbourne, I finally got my citizenship (at the ceremony, I was given a certificate and a native grass; the latter died within a week because this impressive queer has no clue how plants work). I’ve sped through this part of the narrative not because it’s irrelevant – it amounted to a decade of living, waiting, wondering whether The Plan and my happiness would ever eventuate – but because, when it comes down to it, it isn’t special. All migrants go through a bumpy path to citizenship, and despite the dark place I went to when faced with the prospect of deportation, my experiences were nothing compared to the devastating difficulties that asylum seekers, less fortunate migrants and Australia’s First Nations peoples go through.
Still, there’s something compelling about the specific, intertwining experiences of queerness and migration. Much like how I managed to eke out for myself a place in this land I now call home, a ‘new normal’ has emerged in my family dynamic – not a fully-fledged embrace of my bakla ‘tendencies’ per se, but a respect for my assuredness in owning who I am and my ardent advocacy for others to be able to do the same. In my overachiever life, too, I’ve broken new ground in terms of meshing my values with my accomplishments, and understanding that the person I am is so much more than the next accolade or sought-after byline. Most significantly, my queerness is now manifest to its maximal degree – and at no other point in my life have I loved myself sick.
This descriptor, queer, can’t help but remind me of the critical framework of ‘queering’: going against the grain of a text or artwork, or prying deeper to uncover alternative, sometimes unintended, readings. Because identity is eternally in-process. Ideological constructions such as ‘gay’, ‘Filipino’ and ‘Australian’ are so fallible, and frequently fail to embody the shifting, ever-evolving notions that we’re trying to pin down. I’m a naturalised Australian, the processual suffix highlighting that I’m forever locked in a struggle of reaffirming that I belong. Never just natural, I’ll keep getting asked, ‘Where are you really from?’ In much the same way, my queer identity is processual because I’m constantly changing. The word itself – signifying ‘weird’, ‘odd’, ‘left of centre’, ‘going against the grain’ – encapsulates what I’m about, encompassing sexual attraction, gender performance, even overall lifestyle. It’s an acknowledgement that fixity is fallible, that perhaps it is always an illusion. The journey – to find home, to embrace myself – continues.
The Wall of Shame
Natalie Macken
On the bus home at 3.30 pm, it’s still hot. Every time a girl gets up to get off, her thighs make a sound like they’ve been velcroed to her seat. At my stop – me, some other kid, and three boys who shoot Girl Guides with cap guns get off.
I have to walk home with the other kid, who’s having a piano lesson with Mum. It’s the longest eleven minutes of my life. After two blocks of silence, my neck and throat are smarting with awkwardness, so I do what I can.
‘Do you reckon some people can see their eyebrows?’ I ask.
He looks at me like I’ve just licked a street sign. ‘No,’ he says.
I wait for more, but that’s it.
Whatever comes next has to last two streets, so I go mainstream. ‘Are you doing three-unit music next year?’ I say.
‘Probably not,’ he replies, mercilessly.
Like a demigod, my neighbour, Mrs Lalor, appears in her driveway and waves to me. She’s wearing three different types of denim.
I walk through our front door and head straight up to my room, bypassing the kitchen and an unsupervised Milo-straight-from-the-tin opportunity.
I have drum lessons on Wednesdays while Mum’s students play melodies that make the piano sound like it has dementia. I’m debuting my new padded drum-kit stool, hiding behind my hair, nailing a paradiddle rudiment on the snare. A cheap and desperate pine-scented deodorant overrides the smell of limp lettuce coming from my schoolbag. My almost-a-man drum teacher seems impressed with my progress, and I prepare myself for a compliment. Instead, he asks, ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Why?’ I ask.
He’s staring at the far wall of my bedroom. ‘All other girls your age have posters of boys on their wall,’ he says.
I fe
el my whole body fill with white-hot shame. I barely blink, swallow my bile, slow my breathing and, with the nerve of a sniper, say, ‘I took them down when we painted the walls.’
After he leaves my room, I wait for him and his pine-accented armpits to get paid for being only a bit better than me at drums. I stay still and hold my breath until the don’t-get-found-out snake has slithered over my feet and back into its box. Then I open my bedroom door and come out into the space the rest of me takes up. I close the door on my boy-bare wall.
With beats on repeat in my head, I decide to walk up the road to buy a copy of Smash Hits magazine. Mostly because that’s where Heather Brewer got her folder cover of Christian Slater.
‘Yeah, it’s hard to look at all day – NOT,’ she’d said. I think he permanently looks like he’s mildly surprised while squinting into direct sunlight. I don’t get it but . . . whatever.
With my shoes keeping a solid four-four, I lock into the tempo until I pass Eddie’s petrol station with its huge new ‘Shell’ sign out the front. I press play on my Discman and Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ comes on. I keep walking the four.
Deep in the rhythm – that’s when I know it’s not going anywhere, the gay.
I know it’s not what other people are, so I decide to paint my puberty by numbers, copying the moves Heather Brewer makes because she makes the right ones. That’s when Tracy got in her Fast Car, and I went along for the ride.
Jeff at the newsagency has an unspoken ten-minute rule for flipping through magazines. After that, he’ll say, ‘Better buy it to see what happens next.’ I always let him get that one out, but I try to pay before he plays the ‘I’m not a library’ card. I make a detour around Cosmo and Dolly, and pick up a copy of Smash Hits. But, instead of reading it, I open it on a random page to play ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’. Who knew that only six or less steps along a Footloose path were what separated the whole world?
Julia Roberts. Too easy. She was in Flatliners with Kevin Bacon. Her Bacon number is one.
I don’t really want Smash Hits. It’s very Corey-heavy. There’s also a healthy side of Vanilla Ice, Jason Priestley, Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen and Rick Astley. In between all the testosterone, there’s Julia Roberts, like some weird uber-smiling mistake. The thing is, everyone’s got it wrong: I don’t want to be her, I want to be with her. And I know there’s a difference, on a cellular level, on the level where it’s about your skin and your blood and not just about your mind.
‘I’m not a library, you know,’ says Jeff.
I buy the shitty magazine, and Jeff counts out my change on the counter, including two two-cent coins and one one-cent coin.
‘Don’t exist anymore,’ he says, holding up one of the copper coins.
Yes I do, I think, but out loud I say, ‘Yeah, they’re supposed to start disappearing.’
*
That night, I wait for the lull after Home and Away and dinner, when everyone’s doing their own thing. My brother’s annoyed with me because I got the same stereo as his, and I’m annoyed with him because he eats too slowly. He’s playing the Chili Peppers in his room while I pull out posters of shiny, improbable-looking boys from a centrefold of teenage sexuality. It feels alien and abrasive. I feel like I’m betraying myself.
I Blu Tack a panorama of perky-pecced boys onto my wall so I can use them as human shields; my hunky disguise, my boyband safeguard. All I can hear is gay static. There are no discernable gay sounds anywhere on my radar. No gay people in my orbit, no gay news, no gay dogs even.
It’s dark, and everything and everyone has shut up except for the Wonga pigeon that’s taken over my four-four. All the Coreys have combined, and they’re pushing down on my chest. I can’t sleep because I feel like my wall is too loud.
*
In the morning, before I get up, I decide I want Julia up there too. I reason that twenty-two boys cancel out one woman. I put her on the second-last row from the bottom, using the same logic you’d use to answer a multiple-choice test without knowing the answers.
Meinmasha
Atul Joshi
‘Meinmasha, meinmasha,’ my mother giggles, wagging her finger at me.
‘Hee, hee, hee,’ my white-saried grandmother hoots through gapped teeth. My aunt, in demure htamein and blouse, holds her hand over mouth, eyes squeezed shut, and shakes in her chair.
Lapping it up, I twirl faster, hands extending and folding, head cocking side to side. The three women applaud as I take a final bow.
Meinmasha. Never sure what it meant – compliment, endearment or judgement? That Burmese word has haunted me throughout my life.
*
They say the process of coming out is unique for every individual. At one extreme, it’s a dramatic outburst at the dinner table, the whole family gathered around, torch song optional. At the other, it’s quiet and sequential: you tell your best friend, then your next best, and so on; a kind of LGBTIQA+ musical round. Sudden life-changing flash, or tentatively drawn out over time – and dozens of other variations. No one way is right; and let’s face it, every time we meet someone new it’s another moment of coming out.
For me, I went the slow, hesitant route. I assumed it was finally done when I came out to my mother at the age of thirty-eight.
Lately, I’ve come to realise that it’s the same with growing up. At what point do you stop? It’s not just admitting your same-sex attraction, but numerous other aspects that fall within the universe of being queer. Some of this doesn’t happen until well into adulthood.
*
‘Oi, mate, get outta the pool.’ In Australia, a school swimming carnival is an almost clichéd place to realise you are different. ‘Are you a Paki?’
By midsummer, when the solar noon had done its work and turned me almost black, that question would turn into a statement. ‘We don’t want bloody Abos here.’
It was then, in that moment that I first felt – was made to feel – different. And it was in the same moment that pale male flesh became erotically charged for me.
Difference: first, of colour. The colour of my skin. The light spectrum interpreted by our brains. Why do we trust our eyes given that sense’s evident deficiencies and illusions? Clearly those Aussie kids at the pool couldn’t recognise a Burmese Indian when they saw one. Why is sight a basis for both prejudice and attraction?
*
‘What’re you looking at, ya poofta?’ The name-calling changed as I entered my teens.
Here was a second type of difference. No longer just the colour of my skin, now also the feelings it contained marked me out.
I discovered it while loitering a little too long in the changing rooms, excited by the first sight of a pink penis framed by golden pubic hair. I’d joined the school orchestra, and I got lucky at music camp with a bunk right in front of the open shower room. I’d delay getting up so as to watch two gods of my wanking heaven bathing, exposing shockingly large appendages while my hand did its furtive work under the blanket. Not wanting to be a perpetual voyeur, I found the courage to do something about it.
‘Do you, um . . .’ I started asking my strawberry-blond clarinet-playing friend, ‘masturbate?’
‘What’s that?’ he asked, and got me to spell it out for him so that he could look it up. Pressed up next to him on my bed as he flicked through the dictionary, I placed my shaking hand on his thigh.
‘I’m not a homo,’ he said, but didn’t push my hand away. The son of a pastor, he added, ‘It’s a sin,’ before lying back to give me better access.
Thereafter ensued a period of sleepovers where we’d invariably end up in the same bed. While I instinctively knew what to do, he seemed at a loss, particularly when it came to my foreskin-covered penis.
‘It’s like you have a crown sitting on yours,’ he observed, comparing his shiny circumcised head to mine. ‘It’s smaller too.’ Having only seen cocks like his, I began to wonder if I was deformed.
*
Around that time, my family made a pilgr
image to reunite the family dispersed across the Burmese diaspora. After marriages, wars and coups had scattered sisters, brothers, mothers and fathers to Australia, Canada and England, most had settled in India, and that’s where we went to meet aunties and uncles and cousins I’d never seen before. The word ‘gay’ wasn’t common in India and no one spoke about homosexuality. There were the hijras, men who’d chosen to live as women, either with or without surgical procedures. They were a caste of their own, feted at weddings and celebrated for their theatrics, but ostracised in society more widely. I was scared of being labelled one of them and shaming my family.
Riding pillion with my cousin through the streets of Bombay on his two-stroke Bajaj scooter, I pressed into his body and inhaled its musky smell. I kept my hands to myself.
‘You’re a handsome boy,’ one uncle said. ‘You should go into movies, forget the music stuff. More money there.’
‘Have you found a girl for him?’ an aunt asked. ‘I can find a nice one who wants to be a doctor or lawyer. She can earn the money for them both.’
This refrain continued when I visited again after high school. ‘Guests’ were invited to my aunt’s place so they could introduce their daughters. My aunt would report the details to my mum back at home. I had no idea how to react to these set-ups. I couldn’t exactly blurt out that the servant boys bringing out the snacks were far more appealing. I smiled, feigned shyness with the girls and ate the pakoras, vowing never to visit again.
*
Things went rapidly downhill with the pastor’s son as our sins grew worse.
We’d go to symphony concerts together, where I’d touch him in the dark. With the music of the Romantics swirling in my head, I booked the next season for us.
‘Can’t come now,’ he said, when I showed him the tickets. I began to sense avoidance and the beginning of an expulsion. Pimples and bushy facial hair signalled the emergence of raging hormones that were now drawing him to the opposite sex. I was hurt, then jealous.
