Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  With no one to take to the performances, I put a notice up on the school board. Someone, I assume him, scribbled on it, ‘Only faggots need apply’. I was scalded by both the aggression and the rejection; humiliation burned through me.

  *

  For the remainder of high school, I hid in music-making and the arty crowd. Music began to obsess me, especially operas with their larger-than-life love affairs, which started to intrude into my reality. Wagner turned me into someone seeking my own love-death, waiting for the one who would understand me, love me and deliver me. Mahler made me want to quit the world. Music was a type of closet, but it was also a refuge. It offered a relief never matched in real life.

  Inside I was feeling shame: colour shame, sexual shame and body shame. I felt like a bad son, not living up to family expectations. It would take me years to get over this and find the courage to seek out another guy.

  *

  I met him at uni. We were in the same course. We listened to albums together and talked about art and books. I gave him a Tristan und Isolde box set for his twenty-first birthday. Brideshead Revisited was on TV and, after each week’s episode, we would meet up and have our Sebastian and Charles moment. As well as a natural accompaniment to our courtship – a soundtrack – music became a language of emotional intimacy between us, a gateway to and then a foundation for an intense friendship. I came out to my uni friends and, believing I was falling in love, I told my sister (in the safest possible way – a long letter sent while she was studying in the United States).

  Our first and only sexual encounter happened in my bedroom after a night dancing at Patches. It was the evening before my departure for music studies in Europe.

  ‘I can let you out, or park the car and come in,’ he said on the drive home.

  ‘Park the car. We need to be quiet, though.’

  In my bed, we kissed. ‘I’ve never done it before,’ he said.

  I sensed his nervousness. When it came to penetration and anal sex, I too was worried. It had never featured in my fantasies as a boy. I thought how great it would be to be a hermaphrodite. Or to have superpowers that allowed me to change physical sex at will – so that I could turn female when it came to the act. Growing up, I fantasised about being Honey Ryder to Sean Connery’s 007. Looking back now, all those expectations I placed on myself – that get placed on us, seem to be just noise that gets in the way of connection. No amount of transformation, real or imagined, would have made that first encounter less awkward or challenging.

  We settled for oral sex, and I swallowed when he came, thinking we were now bonded. I loved caressing his hairy chest.

  We parted agreeing that international estrangement wasn’t the time to call each other ‘boyfriend’. I still have a photo of him and my best friend seeing me off at the airport. It’s a memory that means so much.

  I should have heeded the warning signs when we first met and he told me he attended church on Sundays. While I was in Europe, he sent a letter saying that he’d found his calling: he was enrolling in theological college to become a missionary and was leaving his ‘gay past’ behind. I wondered what kind of god these white boys prayed to. I wept tears of anger and betrayal. It wounded me most that he was rejecting all of my ‘kind’. He’s now married, a husband and a father. Sometimes we meet by chance at concerts and have a surreptitious cigarette together; I give him gum so his wife doesn’t find out.

  A pattern was set and all through my twenties and into my thirties I chased men who were wrong for me. There were people, friends, I behaved badly with. After a particularly self-destructive break-up, I gave up on finding someone. I realised that music had become a crutch that had accompanied many years of sadness and frustration, but that couldn’t offer me the life I wanted to live. I gave it up as well. It seems to me that we create habits and masks for ourselves, hiding our personal traumas behind work, routine, obsessions, afraid to come to terms with our own identity. The cost is heavy – so much time missed on fully engaging with others and with the joy of living. (The creative urge never disappears, though, and I turned to words later in life.)

  *

  Coming out of the musical closet, I found my gay family and became more comfortable in my skin, my difference, my queerness. As the end of my thirties approached, a friend and I got drunk and agreed we both needed to shake things up before we hit our forties as single men. He introduced me to the world of online dating and hook ups.

  After a decade of celibacy, I became a slut. I figured there was wisdom in numbers. And there was: those years showed me that we’re all different colours, sizes, shapes, as many with as without foreskins. It was a revelation I enthusiastically embraced, and much of my shame melted away.

  And through online chatting I found someone to love me back. We met in a room in the Undernet (there was no Grindr or Scruff then). He lived in Norway and loved dogs and Indian food. After a series of trips, both of us crisscrossing the planet, he became my husband and lives here with me now.

  On one of his first visits, I took him to meet my mother. I was thirty-eight and figured it was time to come out to her; having someone by my side helped. Without saying anything about being gay, I explained that I wanted her to meet the person I wanted to spend my life with. In our family home, we sat either side on a sofa of her. She held both our hands and blessed us.

  *

  I recall being older, but my sister assures me I was two. On the days my grandmother and aunt visited, I’d dress up in my mother’s Burmese htamein, a brightly patterned silk sarong, slip on one of her matching blouses, and apply her thanaka paste across my cheeks, her lipstick to my lips and a spray of her perfume. Picking up a fan, I’d dance for them, imitating the minthamee Burmese dancers we saw at the all-night zat pwe festivals.

  ‘Meinmasha, meinmasha . . .’

  I decided to once and for all find out what it meant. It turns out the word means a man imitating or destined to be a woman. When I read this I was stunned. My mother had called me this? It didn’t matter if she was judging or complimenting me. The word was a gift of understanding, a little clue my mother had left for me, planted in my brain to sprout at the right time. Did I really need to wait so long to come out to her? It wasn’t just as a teen that I’d been different – I’d been different since birth and she’d gently applauded that difference.

  I’d never considered myself caught in the wrong gender, but it dawned on me that the roots of that difference could be tracked back to a lifelong desire to express a feminine side of myself, a queer part of me that didn’t conform to either the ‘oi mate’ or the ‘find him a suitable girl’ masculinity norms. It came out in those James Bond moments, those teenage desires to magically transform my body’s sex. More recently it has emerged in stories I write with transgender leads and androids with the ability to change gender at will. Meinmasha. I started to make sense.

  *

  My sister and I’ve talked recently about visiting our ageing relatives in India, before they pass on. ‘It’s okay, they know,’ she’d said a few years back, after taking a trip there. ‘They’ll be fine. They ask about the both of you all the time. They want you to be happy.’

  India no longer feels like the place of arranged marriages, and there’s a visible LGBTIQA+ community there now. I plan to go with her and my niece next year. My husband can’t come, but I’ll tell my aunts about him, show them pictures, explain what we’re up to. My sister thinks they’ll be content to see me loved, and loving someone in return. And, I hope, in a completely matter-of-fact way, this will be another coming out.

  Kissing Brad Davis

  Scott McKinnon

  In the well-to-do Sydney suburb where I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, there was a single-screen movie theatre where my film-loving mother and I would often spend our Saturdays. Inside was a grand staircase, swirling up from the box office on the ground floor to the theatre doors. The cinema was usually dotted with grey-haired old ladies from the nearby retirement village, sitting ther
e with me and my lovely mum taking in an afternoon matinee. I was a shy, anxious kid, but when the lights went down and the curtains parted, nothing mattered except the movie.

  Apart from at a cinema, the only other way to see movies was on television, and I’d scan the newspaper TV guide religiously each Monday to plan my film schedule for the week. When I was in my early teens, we bought our first VCR and I would go to the local video store as often as I could, gathering a pile of weekly rentals to work my way through. When a film was good, I would often rewind it immediately and start over, or just track back to a favourite sequence, holding the rewind button down and then running the scenes through, again and again.

  I watched countless movies and TV shows. Dramas and comedies, mysteries and musicals. Saturday-morning cartoons and Sunday-night movies of the week. Event miniseries and blockbuster debuts.

  Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of lives lived on the screen, and all of them straight. At best they contained a hint of something shadowy that couldn’t quite be brought into focus. Every kiss I saw, every romance, every single scene of love and intimacy and passion was between a man and a woman. The kind of relationship that I would eventually have was entirely absent. It was so absent that for a long time I didn’t even know I missed it or that I might search for it. An enormous amount of effort went into making sure that queers would never be visible to children.

  Images of gay love existed somewhere, certainly but, like a town that has been left off the map, they played no role in how I imagined the world to be. When I was born, in the 1970s, lesbian and gay liberation movements were in full swing, and newly relaxed censorship laws allowed queer movies like Sunday Bloody Sunday, A Very Natural Thing and the previously banned The Boys in the Band to appear in Australian cinemas. The risqué soap opera Number 96 cheerfully shocked television audiences with the first openly gay and transgender characters on Australian TV. Gay male pornography was even making quasi-legal appearances in disreputable inner-city screening rooms. There were plenty of images of gay male sexuality emerging . . . somewhere.

  But all of these screen entertainments were strictly for adults only. Even the simplest of kisses between men was considered so shocking, even pornographic, that it could never be permitted to appear in a movie accessible to kids.

  The ‘won’t someone think of the children’ brigade will claim that I was being carefully prevented from becoming ‘prematurely sexualised’. Protecting children from adult sexual images may be a worthy goal, but I certainly wasn’t safeguarded from seeing all forms of sexual desire. Children’s entertainment was a hotbed of heterosexuality. The central romance in Lady and the Tramp ensured that I had seen a loving kiss between two animated dogs before I witnessed one between two human males. Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo saw the heroic little Volkswagen fall for a sexy powder-blue Lancia named Giselle, revealing that even cars had heterosexual desire in kids’ films. Of course, a core component of Disney fairytales like Cinderella and Snow White is Prince Charming on the hunt for a kissable heroine. And Miss Piggy’s feelings for a somewhat startled Kermit were nothing short of barefaced, voracious lust.

  What I was prevented from seeing was anything between people (or cars, or animals) of the same gender. The sequestering – that is, the censoring – of even relatively chaste queer images as the province of the ‘adult’ and the ‘sexual’ meant that heterosexuality was the only imagery available to kids like me. Queer youngsters had to make do with lives as subtext in a world keen to pretend we didn’t exist at all.

  My budding sexuality positioned me as a subtext, yes, but the colour of my skin placed me unquestioningly at the centre of almost every movie I watched. As a white kid in Australia at that time, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that someone else might be missing from the screen; for queer kids of colour, the whiteness of both Hollywood and Australian cinema added further layers of absence.

  From the movies I voraciously consumed as a child and as a teen, certain moments linger in my memory as landmarks in my halting sexual and romantic education. Those small, intriguing scenes and images, the likes of which many a queer person will be able to call up as a recollected marker point, caught my attention and suggested, ever so briefly but with vital consequence, that there was something I wasn’t being told.

  Watching the early-’80s Australian movie musical Starstruck on VHS, I remember the single moment that caught my eleven-year-old attention: in one short scene, two male characters float on a li-lo in a rooftop swimming pool, wearing nothing but matching blue Speedos and with their legs casually touching. To adult viewers, the moment was intended to very plainly indicate the homosexuality of these characters, and we see the disappointment register on the face of the female lead, the rising rock star played by Jo Kennedy, who had been hoping to attract the romantic interest of one of them. To me, sitting on my beanbag in our family living room, none of that was clear and my lasting memory is only of those two legs touching.

  I had, to that point, watched men punch, shoot, stab and otherwise harm one another in any number of imaginatively violent ways, but this was the first time I had seen affection between two men expressed as an indication of sexual or romantic desire. Those two legs touching was a form of male physical intimacy that I had never seen before and it was fascinating. Instead of wanting to harm one another, these men were enjoying a shared moment of easy, sensual touch.

  My own desires were gradually, confusingly, disconcertingly taking shape: a crush on a student teacher who all-too-briefly taught at my primary school; a post-match visit to a rugby league locker room that was far more interesting to me than the game itself; the smiling male underwear models who, compared to their seductively posing female counterparts, seemed slightly shame-faced standing in only their jocks in the pages of department store catalogues. Beyond these occurrences, it was TV and movies that provided opportunities to look unguardedly at men. In Lethal Weapon, Mel Gibson climbed out of bed and walked across a room naked and it was just . . . bloody . . . great (rewind, watch again, rewind, watch again, rewind, watch again). Rob Lowe in About Last Night, Christopher Atkins in The Blue Lagoon and Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing all provided thrilling, if undefinable and puzzling, moments for me. But even in those moments, something wasn’t right: these men were sexy, sure – sometimes shirtless and yes, occasionally even naked. But they were just glimpses. The blokes never lay languidly in their underwear or slowly undressed while the camera traced their flesh and the soundtrack piped sexy ’80s saxophone. The hero always had to be somewhere in time to kill someone. I was a feminist film critic on training wheels, wondering why the camera only ever offered women as objects of desire.

  I’m not sure when I first saw two men kiss onscreen, but it may well have been Midnight Express. I was twelve or thirteen and, while my parents were on holiday, my aunty Wendy and her boyfriend Phil came down from Tamworth. Midnight Express, the harrowing, and somewhat controversial, late-’70s prison drama is most definitely not a kids’ film, but Wendy grabbed it from the video store and allowed me to watch. Adapted for the screen by Oliver Stone, the film tells the true story of a young American student imprisoned in Turkey for attempting to export hashish. The film’s star, Brad Davis, beautiful and, more than once, naked, intrigued me. In a steamy prison shower scene, Davis is kissed by a fellow inmate. I was quietly awestruck, while Phil expressed his discomfort: ‘I think he’s turning a bit weird, Scott.’

  Phil was a good guy, and his ‘bit weird’ was fairly mild, but there were few straight Aussie blokes at the time who could let such a moment pass without some kind of comment – a cautionary notice. The film itself echoed that particular lesson: Davis pulls away from the kiss and gently but firmly shakes his head; no, the all-American hero will not participate further in such activities. Never mind that the memoir upon which the film was based details a loving romantic and sexual affair between Davis’ character and that fellow prisoner. Never mind that Davis himself was bisexual.

  The movie ob
sessions of my childhood and teen years reveal an unwitting – if, retrospectively, all too clear – fascination with subtextual queerness. I loved the 1987 horror comedy The Lost Boys, in which teen idol Corey Haim (with a Rob Lowe poster on his bedroom wall, no less) tries to defend his hunky big brother, played by Jason Patric, from being recruited to a gang of equally hunky, leather-wearing vampires. Patric is given a female love interest, played by Jami Gertz, but the film is far more interested in the calls from the alluring bad-boy bloodsuckers for him to ‘join us’. I didn’t consciously recognise the movie’s now bleedingly obvious queerness at the time; I just knew that I loved it and watched it so often I could recite much of its dialogue.

  The Lost Boys also features Dianne Wiest, one of my many actress obsessions, those who played the strong female characters who I always wanted the story to be about, but who were generally relegated to love interests or subplots. Sure, Harrison Ford was incredibly handsome, but why couldn’t Raiders of the Lost Ark have been about Marion Ravenwood, the fierce, brawl-starting, drinking competition–winning Karen Allen character? She was a woman running a dive bar in Nepal, for goodness sake. And how could anyone want to see more Roger Moore in A View to a Kill with Grace Jones in the same film? I was never much interested in religious education at my Catholic school, because my holy trinity already comprised Bette Midler in The Rose, Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. Amen. I prayed at their church long before I had the slightest clue of their ordained central place in gay culture – before I had the slightest clue that there even was such a thing as gay culture.

  I don’t know when exactly that snippets of information accumulated into certainty that there were people called ‘gay’ who loved and desired people of their own gender and existed outside the shower room of Turkish prisons. By the time that uncertain flicker burst into a radiant glow, I was determined to remain forever in the dark. In my school playground, being gay was the worst thing you could possibly be. I didn’t really buy into that idea – I had no problem with other people being gay – but I was a well-behaved kid who rarely pushed even the tiniest boundary of what was considered good behaviour. How, then, could I ever step into a world that seemed to only lurk on the fringes? Surely I, like Davis, would shake my head, no? Surely I was still Herbie looking for my Giselle, a Tramp in search of his Lady, a charming prince looking for a girl in a coma protected by dwarves?