Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  At four I was a pretty boy, with a penchant for piggy tails in my hair and the tartan kilt my parents bought me on a trip to Scotland. Mum reassured my siblings that such a ‘skirt’ was appropriate attire for men in a faraway land. For me it felt so much better than pants and flew up when I spun. But I was a farm kid. Dad worked in town, but we lived on a farm in a rundown house with a big old English garden of camellias and rhododendrons. My older brothers rode their motorbikes around the paddocks while I picked flowers to decorate my cubby house. While they hosed mud off motorbike wheels, I tied back the curtains, put violets in a vase on the windowsill and straightened the old doormat Mum had given me.

  *

  Everywhere, nothing. All about me nothing but the long, flat day ahead. Summer holidays: cattle to be mustered from one paddock to another; sheep who’d missed crutching to have their arses doused with kerosene to kill the maggots; a long climb uphill from the pump house by the dam where I had to turn on the pump to fill the tanks, top of the list on a hot north-wind day; jobs to be done before I was left to the drawn-out day with my brothers. The long, hot day of bored adolescent boys, harassing, tormenting, prodding and poking.

  Any reaction we could get from animals on the farm was a good one. Masking tape wrapped around a pony’s nose so he bucked and thrashed up the paddock, chased by shotgun fire to really get him going. Constable the prize bull corralled into a small yard, menaced for hours with a red raincoat off the laundry floor until he crossed over from reliable old mate to something quite unrecognisable; later sold and then destroyed after ‘inexplicably’ chasing Dad across a paddock with murderous intent. Pet rabbits riddled with myxomatosis set free to blindly hop about the duck-house paddock with their eyes pustulent, their hair in clumps, easily picked off with the slug gun. ‘Spaz, get out the way,’ my brother shouting as a bloody carcass sails passed my head. One from another direction slaps me in the back. The neighbour’s sheep shot in the fleece with the same gun, the butt steadied on the stone parapet of the verandah that stretched around the house and to the west overlooked the neighbouring paddocks. A feeble, slack old gun that fired pellets in such lacklustre fashion the sheep jumped but did not fall. Fifteen chickens squashed into the pellet feeder in the chook house. A record. When we took off the lid the first one jumped out flapping its wings in distress, the one on the bottom not so much. Four boys and a stretched-out summer’s day. The small fox terrier tied to the large German short-haired pointer, collar to collar with a length of bailing twine, then a stick thrown into the dam to see what would happen as the little one trailed through the brown water on its back struggling for air. Hilarity, success, the helpless yelping of the poor little fella. Guinea pigs, mice, rats, cats, all with a role to play. The fecundity of farm life: pulling lambs, watching cows mate, the foreplay of a bull’s muzzle under a stream of warm piss and then his pizzle extended. The mad gyrations of a bullish buck rabbit, the corkscrew penis of the house boar. The unrestrained language of the farmhands who narrated the scene – ‘the bitch is hot for it’, ‘stick it to her old fella’ – as they guided the ravenous veined penis of a stallion into a nose-twitched and hobbled mare: ‘she’s buckled down for ya old mate, what ya waiting for?’ Too many kittens smacked dead with the head of a shovel.

  Before they were used for crutching at the start of winter and then shearing in the summer, the rusty-but-just-functional clippers in the dilapidated shearing shed needed lubrication. So did my dick. The pot of dirty Vaseline that sat behind the shearing stand was put to good use. Me, I used that lotion in a rushed, shameful moment, probably repeated countless times in hot sheds and private crevices on farms across the country – boys making do in the experimentation of desire. A watermelon with a hole in it or the sheath of a used toilet role – boys making do.

  There were few hard and fast rules in the liberal household I grew up in, but Mum once quoted statistics from some American study about the number of boys on farms who have sex with animals. This, she said, as well as the backward fifteen-year-old doing laps of the neighbouring front garden on her three-wheeled bike, was off limits. It seemed there were few limits in our house back then: sex, sexuality, coarse language, challenged bloodlines, infidelity, women leaving their husbands, husbands pursuing other men’s wives, parents experimenting with marijuana. Meat and three veg confronted by avocado pears, halva and feta cheese; experimentation and new offerings were embraced by my parents in ways I didn’t often see in my friends’ houses. Mum baking a cake for the opening of a feminist bookshop in Stirling. Dad having the money and the inclination to buy a piece of farm equipment one day and then a Pro Hart painting of a dead grasshopper covered in ants on another. The possibilities and limitations of the time were being tested as my parents pushed against the restrictions of previous generations into an uncharted world, governed, among other things, by the pill and the sexual freedoms it bought.

  Me, the hot shed and, when I found a moment to steel away, a dirty old jar of Vaseline. My brothers? I could guess. Their relief and release, I don’t know.

  My older brother had stolen the centrefolds from a stack of Playboy and Penthouse magazines we found at the rubbish dump near our holiday house on Kangaroo Island. After a surprisingly easy consultation with Dad, we were allowed to take them home from the dump but instructed to leave them in the nightstand on his side of the bed. Over the years, the magazines moved from the nightstand as lines of desire radiated around the house; then across the water to the mainland. Some of the foldouts my brother kept and others, much to my father’s fury when it was discovered, he sold at school, a sign of the entrepreneurial spirit that would see him one day become very rich. Privately I used the magazines as best I could, but other than the playful meta-frisson of desire they lent to our household, there was not a lot in them for me. As a group though, my brothers and I used them loudly and they shaped our thoughts about sex as we forged our way through adolescence. ‘The holiday treat’, those magazines were called, and along with one tube each of sweetened condensed milk from the corner store to suck on as we made beds and swept dead spiders and scorpions out of the house at the start of the summer, they were part of the holiday we looked forward to. As with the dictum, I only read Playboy for the articles, it was not so much the photos that were circulated among us but most often the ‘letters’, or silly cartoons, representations that allowed for a kind of distance from the bodies on display. A way of sharing our needs and desires together through dappled light rather than the harshness and humiliation of looking straight at them.

  My sister, the oldest and the most confident reader among us kids, enthralled us after dinner (and sometimes before breakfast) by reading aloud the letters to ‘Harvey’, a type of Agony Aunt who dispensed advice about sex from one of the magazines. Harvey’s pronouncements would then be regurgitated after dinner when Mum had gone to bed and Dad was drunk and leaning well back on a straining kitchen chair, or, and usually with more fun, on fishing trips in the boat when not much was biting. ‘Harvey says take it slow and use lots of lube’ my brother said as Dad fought to bring a fish into the boat. ‘Keep your tip up, Dad, and take it slow, use lots of lube or you’ll lose her, that’s what Harvey would say.’ Dad would laugh and shake his head, feigning a type of limit to our vulgarity, but really he enjoyed the banter of the irreverent children he was raising, children with so much more sexual information than he at that age, the only child of a shamed divorcee.

  ‘The poor little bugger was so horny he wore a condom on his date . . .’, one of us said; ‘Meat, we call the man Meat . . . Oh my god, look at the size of that thing, the boy’s deformed . . .’ I said in an American accent, and my brothers laughed. We egged each other on. ‘Pee-wee is so small, we’ll have to tie a board across his arse, he’s liable to fall in,’ another brother said. These were the lines we would recite as the boat bobbed about and we tossed stinking ground bait into the sea. Lines from horny American teenagers in the ’80s film Porky’s. Us boys watched that film over and over
, borrowing the tape from the local petrol-come-convenience store in town repeatedly, when VHS home video was all the rage.

  ‘Cherry Forever’ was the busty hooker. She was the sexual tutor of the film, guiding young men to adulthood when they visited Porky’s, the riverside brothel across state lines. She was talked about endlessly on the boat too. ‘You’d get your brothel slippers off for Cherry, Dad, wouldnya?’ we’d laugh. Dad had recently started wearing slip-on shoes, which had never been done before by the men or boys in our family, and for which we quickly coined the term ‘brothel slippers’ because, we reasoned, they were quick to get off and quick to get back on when you only had a lunch hour to spare. ‘Wouldnya Dad, off and on at top speed for Cherry Forever?’ Again, he would smile and sip his can and smoke and then, ‘Stop your carryon damn you, I’ve missed a bite,’ as he jerked the tip of his fishing rod into the air. Within the rarefied legal circles in which he spent much of his life, his potty-mouthed children, ‘wise’ beyond their years, I think he saw as a strange badge of honour. I think we were a way to feel he resisted the stifling expectations of being a big fish in a small pond.

  As you can see, sex was never a taboo topic in our household, but it was framed by the language of the day, the limits of representation.

  At about the same time Harvey and Cherry Forever were working on the shape of our desires, a series of abductions and murders of young men were detailed in the Adelaide papers, in what became known as The Family murders. Grim but salacious daily reports of a sinister group of suspected homosexuals and the places in Adelaide never to be walked alone at night – moral lesson, cautionary tale, spicy titillation, all with a role to play in the fashioning of a small-town identity and its curtailing of new identities and their struggle for acceptance.

  I was never a strong reader. On a farm with a pack of siblings it was always outside play, and there were endless jobs to be done after school or on weekends, like chopping wood in winter and slashing grass in summer. But I read those sinister articles as best I could. I was drawn to the scandal and the pictures of boys around my age who, the paper explained, had been found (and for the fortunate ones, woken) with lubricant on their anus. They said that in the papers! The young men who looked out from the pages, where had they been going? Why them?

  The boys, the paper said, are walking along the roadside when a car approaches, slows and stops, words are exchanged; a local mowing his front lawn looks on without registering the significance of the moment; the boy, for whatever reason, gets into the car, is offered a drink doctored with tranquilisers, and is taken to an isolated cabin in the Kuitpo forest or some such place on the outskirts of Adelaide and held for days. Sexually used, touched, lubricated, forced, hurt, killed. Lubricant on his anus. I quietly folded in on myself and in a faraway place in front of the fire with the hurly burly of It’s A Knock Out or the frenzied titillation of Benny Hill on the TV, I read and reread that line. Lubricant on his anus. ‘We don’t often see you reading the paper,’ Mum commented. I think she was curious, but did not inquire further. The first time I came across the word ‘discrete’ was in one of these articles. Without caution I asked Mum what it meant and she explained but asked for no explanation in return.

  Four boys to sleep in the same room, with less than an arm’s length between beds. Breathing, farting, coughing, torches on, torches off. What are they thinking as the lights are switched off? Them, I don’t know: pocket money; school; Cherry Forever; Dad cutting the nuts off a calf with a rusty razorblade (the calf screams and thrashes, Dad shouts, ‘sit on its bloody head, keep it still’, the dog waits and licks its lips); the long walk home from the school bus when the holidays are over; the women from the magazines (one dressed in an airhostess’ cap and neck scarf with her pubic hairs shaved into the shape of a pilot’s wings, another riding a bicycle with a dildo where the seat should be); Harvey telling a woman the calorie count of semen and explaining that swallowing it won’t spoil her diet. What are they thinking as I hear them breathe? Them. Who knows? Me. Where do I walk to meet these men? You won’t need to drug me or pressure me. I will do it because I want to. Pick me. I will be the one walking with the blue schoolbag and uniform. I will be by myself if you tell me when to walk there. You will not need to hurt me. I won’t run. Put on the lubricant and I will stay by your side. I will give you my all.

  The newspaper reported that a beer bottle was inserted into one of the boys. What are the limits and possibilities of the body? Of a boy’s body? Of a body like mine? Tell me where to walk and I will be there. I can take the bus. Tell me where to get off and I will wait.

  *

  And then, before you know it, the holidays are over. School. At fifteen the expectation was that kissing a girl was appropriate, titting one was game, and fingering one was a scandal or legendary depending on who found out. I moved among the lockers in a liminal zone, the onslaught of images from the past summer swilling about in me. I moved through the change rooms and the sports lockers in 1986. In the classroom I made myself belong wherever I sensed safety. Ebbed and flowed. I was a malleable chameleon-like creature who learnt to read clues and anticipate actions minute to minute, hour to hour, sometimes in, sometimes out. Sex Ed, History, Ag Science, Maths, Religious Studies, Art, parties, repeatedly watching Brooke Shields in Endless Love instead of doing my homework, smoking down the back of the oval, stealing clothes and sunglasses from shops in Rundle Mall on a Friday night, tucking them under my school blazer, the emblem on the pocket suggesting a crime not based in economics. A crime of need nevertheless. At home after school I was rough with my brothers, cruel to animals some days and dependent on them for love on others. Same with Mum. The first time I called her a cunt she was at the stove frying eggs. She swung around and whacked me open-handed in the face.

  *

  In another room on the TV leather queens in New York are dying. The news reports flick between good-looking men celebrating in the street, hospitals and funerals, the clash between church, science and politics. ‘Twenty sexual encounters a night each man might have in a sex club,’ the reporter says. On another channel, Lady Di touches a young man’s hand; more than anything he looks frightened. With great compassion, touches a skeletal man’s hand and makes it to the front page of the world’s papers. The Patron Saint of Sodomy, she was cruelly labelled. Again, clumsily, sitting in front of the TV on Sunday night with toast and tomato soup, ‘What is sodomy?’ I ask Mum. ‘Men can love women; men can love men,’ she said without derision or distain. Like avocados and feta cheese, she did not look away from what many around her kept at a distance.

  She never fitted in well with the other school mums. She didn’t really like talking about other people’s lives. I think I was lucky. That year she bought a box of condoms and left them in the pantry near the muesli bars and other stuff for school lunches. She didn’t mince words: ‘There is a thing out there called AIDS. I don’t care if you are having sex or who with. If you are doing it, put one of these on.’ It was not the fear of her sons getting girls pregnant but the fears of AIDS that brought condoms into our house for the first time, without Pee-wee or Cherry Forever around to soften the blow. After the first time I had sex with a man, I washed my mouth out with straight gin and gave myself a solid talking to that it would not happen again.

  *

  Is it respectable chronology or relevance that illustrates a good life, a worthy life, one that is valued, nourished, treasured? Desire, hope, possibility, need, love, isolation, fear, all that has gone before, the grime and the crime woven into a matrix with few outsides. The tiny spaces between the fibres of this web, I wriggled through and found you. I wish I wasn’t embarrassed by the sight of two men in white suits, embracing after they exchange rings. I wish my elbow did not lock when you take my hand as we walk down the street. I wish I did not feel caught out when my neighbour sees me arranging flowers on the front verandah. Flowers to make our home even more beautiful. I wish I did not try to catch the eye of good-looking men who walk p
ast – even with you at my side – in the hope one might drain from me what I can’t show you, can’t afford to show you. What I look away from too. Where will that stuff sit? Harvey and Cherry Forever and Reg Livermore and Leonard Cohen and Endless Love and dead young men and vicious older ones and a hard-working dad and a socially progressive mum and a little brown dog yelping for its life as it gets dragged through dark water on its back – where do we put all that? My question to you, dear man: where? But I suppose in each celebration, each milestone, each argument or embrace, each pause or stumble, each sexual moment with you that gets there and the ones that miss or do not happen, you see a little more of me growing up gay in Adelaide and hopefully that moves us closer.

  Angry Cleaning

  Nathan Mills

  Every so often, my dad would wander into the kitchen, open the refrigerator and begin to clear it out. To the unassuming, this probably sounds like a solid end-of-the-week activity – evidence of discipline and good housekeeping. But it was his catharsis, a release, after a week of demanding, twelve-hour work days. Come Sunday, if he was unlucky enough to find a tidy fridge, his back-up was yelling at a telemarketer who called while he was reading the paper. But, if all went to plan, Dad would look inside that fridge, at its long-expired leftovers, and loudly, proudly, expel the frustration that had been building inside him – one spoiled spaghetti dinner at a time.

  Sundays were particularly useful for this. For one thing, Dad usually had Sundays off and, for another, we were all around on Sundays. Mum would be folding washing or falling asleep to daytime TV, my sisters and I would be in our bedrooms or on the couch. So when Dad complained about the state of the fridge, there was always someone within earshot to listen. His favourite way to do this was to sigh emphatically at something he’d discovered and then ask (to no one in particular), ‘Does anybody still want this?!’ As if we all knew intuitively what he was referring to and, in that moment, were only too grateful to be part of this crude substitute for self-care. At the end of it all, the fridge would be clean, and Dad would return to his paper. But everything about this was performative: not once have I known the man to clean quietly. If he’s going to do it, he’d better have a fucking audience. Maybe this is a skill passed down to all once-closeted queer children – we can smell an act a mile off.