by Benjamin Law
You see, Dad rarely had an audience when he was younger. Like most big families, they were too busy – getting everyone to school on time or making sure the one footy uniform, shared between four brothers, was washed and dried each night – to pay much attention to any single family member.
I never had a brother and, to be honest, when Dad told me about the number of times his older brother, stumbling in drunk at night, had climbed onto the top bunk above him and peed onto Dad through the mattress, I was pretty happy to stick with sisters. Being loaded into the car each night while Mum drove my sisters to and from their dance classes was pretty much as bad as it got.
Still, there’s a nagging feeling you develop as a kid when you’re the short, skinny, closeted son of a sparky from a very big and very male Catholic family. You notice your differences first, and everything else second. Dad would take me to the football, and I would whinge. Two guys on TV would kiss, and Dad would whinge. Our relationship was defined by opposing politics and interests. Nothing about my worldview and my dad’s worldview lined up.
It’s not as if he didn’t try to meet me halfway. There were several father–son bonding days: trips to the movies (we will always have the time we saw Cars together), to the footy, or to a job site he was working on. And I, in turn, put myself out there and took up sport. The year my family moved from Brisbane to Hobart to be closer to our relatives, I signed up for football, started karate and played tennis. This was a big deal for me: getting up early on the weekend, the temperature just over two degrees, pulling on footy shorts or a karate uniform, and trudging out the back door to mum’s Toyota Spacia. This was never my idea of a weekend well spent, no matter how happy it made my dad.
In retrospect, there is something comical about me at age eight, standing on a footy field early in the morning, while frost melts on the grass, surrounded by boys twice my height, wearing a jersey that didn’t fit me (‘This is the smallest one they sell,’ Mum would always say), trying just hard enough so that we could all count this as me giving it a go. But for the rest of my life I would remain as effeminate and uncomfortable on a footy field as I would remain short.
For what it’s worth, I was an altar boy the same year. But I navigated Sunday Mass with ease. Like sport, there were uniforms and spectatorship but, unlike it, I left Mass clean and in under an hour – our priest kept things to the point.
While I was there, I never forgot the grim relationship between religion and my sexuality, but God and Hell were removed, abstract concepts to me, and being an altar boy was just a decent way to pass the time. What mattered was that I got to wear an outfit, hold everyone’s attention and keep my dad happy.
*
The family moved back to Brisbane a year later, into our old house, and picked up life where we’d left off. There, my attempts to fake an interest in sport began to wane; I never played football or tennis again, and I eventually quit karate.
‘Nan cried when Mum told her you’d stopped going to karate,’ my sister told me a few months later. ‘Nan said: “But Nathan can’t give up on his karate!”’
‘No, she didn’t!’ I insisted, but unsure. I was thirteen years old at the time.
It was like they could all see it: the steady decline of my mission towards adult masculinity. Surely, they all thought, if I just kept at it, maybe found a sport I was good at, toughened up a little, I’d be right. I’d grown out of that knitting phase when I was seven; my barbie of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz sat disregarded and unloved in a cupboard somewhere. I would grow out of this.
If I’m honest, I thought I might too. Puberty, surely, would be my saving grace. When my body changed, so would I. And everything certainly did change: my voice deepened, a trail of brown hair grew from my balls to my arsehole, a tiny but reassuring patch of hair appeared on my chest, and my interest in guys moved from an innocent curiosity to full-on obsession. I think it was the same year that Daniel Radcliffe starred in Equus and, not by coincidence, the first time I ever Google-searched images of a naked man. The last glimmer of my heterosexuality was fading in front of my eyes.
It’s easy to look back on this time with a sort of knowing warmth for my innocence. Poor little gay Nathan, trying so hard to convince himself that he’s straight. But if I were to sum up queer childhood in one word, a catch-all descriptor for kids attempting to come to terms with themselves, I’d say that it’s lonely – remarkably so. Loneliness seems to be the most consistent marker of queer adolescence, shared among all queer kids and shared yet among none.
All minorities struggle in their own particular ways – feeling pain, disadvantage, isolation – but there is something about being young and scared and gay that draws you out of the world around you. You don’t have a family of queer people who understand that; you are a minority of one in your own life. Trying, in my case, to reconcile the facts that I was a boy, and from the moment I was conscious of this I was also certain I should tell no one that I liked boys the way that other boys liked girls. I’m not sure how I knew that so early on, but, however I did, I knew it as clearly as I knew my eyes were blue, my name was Nathan, that I had sisters, a mum and a dad, and I couldn’t tell any of them that I was gay.
At some point, much later, I think I realised that dad and I had been stuck on the same conveyor belt, slouching towards the masculine promised land. We had learnt the same rules, willingly or not, and had both done our best to follow them. But something happened to me that probably happens to most out queer people – when queer kids become queer adults, when they stop praying to God at night to make them normal (Nope, still a homo, I’d think the next morning, before turning over to cry into my pillow), where everything sort of clicks, somewhere around eighteen, maybe; you step off the conveyor belt, abandon any idea that you will ever be the cool, apathetic straight boy you always wanted to be, and start to get on with living. In fact, something about the whole thing becomes so unappealing. You start to wonder, Why do these straight guys keep punching each other? Where does all that anger come from? Do none of them just sit down and talk to each other? No, I guess they probably don’t.
Earlier this year, Dad came home one day and told me he had cancer. He said it quickly, as if by accident, and I remember being grateful that I hadn’t already gone out for the day. This wasn’t the kind of news anyone should bring home to an empty house. When he told me, it was like something in him snapped, like the fibres that held him in place completely dissolved. He cried, and I hugged him, and all I could think was that this was the first time in my life we had done this. My dad didn’t cry often; he still doesn’t. But when he did, it was like everything in him, his years of stoicism and the most Australian kind of middle-aged masculinity, vanished in an instant. He was unburdened, for a moment, from what I had to let go of years ago.
*
I should qualify this by saying that, despite his diagnosis, Dad still likes to clean out the fridge while everyone’s around. Perhaps, in a family with three women and a gay son, he’s desperate to prove that he is the most dramatic member. Some guys like to punch other guys when they’re angry; at least cleaning out the fridge is productive.
The cancer, as it turns out, was a false alarm, but Dad’s doctor recommended that he start drinking green tea to help with his ridiculously enlarged prostate – the cause of this false alarm. And he drinks it, every day – with milk. To me, that was the shocking part: that my diabetic father, who refuses to even own a blood-sugar measure (‘I can tell how I’m feeling just fine. I don’t need that thing to tell me’), was actually taking a doctor’s advice. But, you know, small steps. These things take time. It is only green tea.
Unlike Dad, my life hasn’t been marked by life-altering news or some major crisis. Growing up queer was more of a slow burn, anyway. The big stuff was simply a lot of small stuff, from childhood until now, that helped shape who I am: all those times kids at school called me gay (shit, they weren’t wrong); the time my sister told me that boys shouldn’t try to knit; when I d
ecided I no longer wanted to kill myself; the time I went travelling and saw gay men embracing in public as if there weren’t whole swathes of the country where that just didn’t happen; my first drunken kiss with a curious friend, who told me the next day that he regretted it; or the time I gave a guy a small amount of head on the side of the Brisbane River (I really wouldn’t recommend this, although it did feel like a humble ode to the city that made me to get some next to the river that made it). Small steps and small moments, all leading to here. None of those moments, thankfully, involved me getting cancer or fearing for my life, but they stick out anyway, like waypoints on a map. And while I can now go on dates and watch porn (unashamed), like any other sexually frustrated gay man, it all mostly just means that, even though I wasn’t then, I’m fine now.
The Exchange
Alice Boyle
When I was seventeen, Mum insisted we host a Belgian exchange student. The email had pinged into her inbox: a plea for a host family, any host family, who were prepared to take on a Belgian vegetarian with a fear of dogs. It was accompanied by a personal profile headed by a photo of a tall, pale girl with a mess of ginger curls. Mum called me into the study and asked me what I thought. According to her, the vegetarian thing was a non-issue – I still had a lingering reluctance to eat meat after my heart had been broken by a vegan a year earlier. Apparently the dog thing was fine too – our cocker spaniel, Max, was more like a very hairy black slipper than an actual dog.
Mum’s face lit up as she read the profile. Words were jumping out at her: ‘loves reading’, ‘theatre’, ‘learning languages’. Just like me, in other words. Words jumped out at me, too: ‘Roman Catholic’, ‘youth group leader’, ‘small town’. I said that definitely, categorically, under no circumstances was I dragging a Catholic youth group leader around for six weeks. I’d only just extricated myself from the closet a couple of years prior, and felt lucky to have made it out alive the first time. I refused to fold myself back into a space that had been too small for me since my first homo make-out dream at the age of ten. No bloody way was it happening. Point blank no, Mum.
So that’s how we ended up hosting a Belgian exchange student.
*
I was a shit to Annelien before she even arrived. Rather than go to the airport with my family like a dutiful host sister, I blew off her arrival for my friend TJ’s black-and-white birthday party – my last moment of freedom before being saddled with a conservative religious nut, I figured.
TJ’s doorbell rang at around ten, and I was summoned to meet the Belgian. I dragged my beribboned heels the length of the hall. It’s no mean feat to be sullen in a French maid outfit, but I have to say I handled it with aplomb. Annelien stood on the doorstep, bursting with more energy than was properly decent immediately following a twenty-hour flight. My parents looked exhausted by comparison; maybe they were just reeling from the incessant stream of chatter.
‘Hi, my name’s Annelien, it’s so nice to meet you, I’ve been looking forward to coming to Australia for the longest time, and now it’s here, and the flight was so long but it’s fine, I’m not tired at all, and your parents said you’re attending a party – would you mind terribly if I stayed and joined you?’
Her accent was, disconcertingly, full British. She flung herself at me and gave me a hug. I was thrown off balance in more ways than one. I invited her in. She was decked out in a rainbow jacket and a purple scarf, a rosella in a flock of magpies. She didn’t shut up the whole night. I already adored her.
*
I’m not sure how Annelien didn’t clock my queerness for the six weeks she lived with us. Maybe she did but was too polite to say. Even though I thought she was amazing, and even though we could each talk the hind leg off a donkey – leaving the poor donkey almost legless – I didn’t say anything. Even though I figured out pretty quickly that she wasn’t Catholic and that her youth group was actually a theatre troupe full of queer kids and art freaks, I still kept my mouth shut. Call it internalised homophobia or self-preservation or whatever. When the topic of romance came up, I fudged; technically, I told myself, it wasn’t a lie to say that I didn’t have a boyfriend. Thankfully, Annelien had enough to say about her own boyfriend to compensate for my supposed chastity.
Once or twice a week, I’d send Annelien home on her own, ostensibly because I was ‘hanging out with friends. You wouldn’t like them.’ My girlfriend and I would meet up in the city, she in jeans and a hoodie, her hair stiff with gel, me tugging self-consciously at my snooty private school uniform. We’d make out behind flower beds in the Alexandra Gardens, lying on the damp, cold ground and pushing frantically at each other. One time we went to the movies just to have somewhere warm and dark to go. A white baby boomer spun around in her seat and told us off for making spectacles of ourselves.
It was winter, and options were limited. At that point, my parents were still alternating between rage and denial over having a gay kid. My girlfriend was deeper in the closet than I’d ever been, trying to hide her queerness from the entire Vietnamese population of Melbourne. I followed her lead and kept our relationship hidden from all but my closest friends. Secrets were how we lived. What was one more?
*
I didn’t tell Annelien the truth until a couple of years later. She went home without ever knowing, but we stayed in touch. I’d always sucked at long-distance friendships, and yet, somehow, this one seemed to stick. We both finished school, started uni, had literary aspirations. My long emails contained most of the truth, although a few important details were carefully omitted. For example, the fact that my girlfriend and I had gone our separate ways, me having been a dickhead and dumping her in the thoughtless way that comes so easily to teenagers. I was already dating a sweet painting student who loved David Bowie and wore fifties-style dresses when my dad, so fit and healthy, started having chest pain. Mum had him at a cardiologist that afternoon, her GP training making her swift and decisive. Yes, there was a blockage. Yes, he needed surgery. No, it couldn’t wait.
I don’t know why I sent Annelien that email. It’s not like Dad wasn’t totally fine. He came home from hospital, pale and slow, but otherwise his usual self. Still, I emailed her in a mess of tears. Something about mortality and not living a lie. Some carpe diem shit that I probably picked up at my fancy school. The message was something along the lines of: ‘Dad’s just had heart surgery and I thought he was going to die, oh, and also I’m gay, didn’t want to lie to you anymore, sorry ’bout that.’
Mainly she was just pissed that I hadn’t felt like I could trust her.
It felt like breathing out. And so our friendship went on.
It was also around that time that my cousin proposed to his French girlfriend. The wedding would be happening the following European summer, and would I like to come? As one of the few English- and French-speaking guests, I would be Very Valuable for cross-cultural translation. France is right next to Belgium. Of course I said yes.
*
Annelien and her mum picked me up from the station in Bruges, and we drove back to their family home. Rumbeke is little more than a blip on the map, a stretch of road with a bakery, a pharmacy and a few houses surrounded by cornfields. A funny place for an arty theatre-book nerd to grow up. I met Annelien’s kind blonde sporty family. She and I were the off-kilter peas in the proverbial pod.
We stayed in Rumbeke for two days, crisscrossing the paths through the cornfields and filling each other up with our news. I told her about my latest girlfriend, a strong-willed theatre student who lived by the beach, made excellent poached eggs, and when pressed supposed her favourite musician would probably be Michael Bublé. Annelien told me about moving halfway across the country to study, about her boyfriend (yes, still the same boy) and her dream of becoming a writer.
Once my jetlag wore off, the two of us made the three-hour pilgrimage to Antwerp, where Annelien was studying. Our train pulled through stations with names I couldn’t pronounce: Kortrijk, Waregem, Sint-Niklaas. The train had
long benches arranged in open compartments, with luggage racks and hooks for passengers’ coats. Nobody was wearing a coat. It was the hottest summer Belgium had had in years. The heat was different to that at home. Melbourne summers were a sharp, dry, burning heat; crispy grass; air-conditioned supermarkets and cinemas; and ghost-town streets as everyone flocked to the shore. In Belgium the heat was still and damp, and the countryside was so green, even at the height of summer. We cracked open the train windows and inhaled the smell of the foliage. There’s no air conditioning in Belgium – there’s usually no need – and our sweaty legs stuck to the vinyl banquettes. Belgians often joke that summer is the nicest day of the year, but that year, summer went for weeks.
Annelien’s room was a blaze of sunlight in a shitty old building. The communal kitchen smelt like mildew, but at least it was cool. I slept on a mattress on her bedroom floor, flung out and exhausted after spending each day walking along broken-up cobbled streets in clogs, drinking beer on terraces, and talking with Annelien, always talking. We met her friends for pizza, we went to the chocolate museum, we shopped for vintage suitcases. She told me the legend of how Brabo had cut the hand off a giant and thrown it into the Scheldt, giving Antwerp its name. It was a fucked-up story. We also visited her uni to pick up her exam results. The place was straight out of Harry Potter. Tall girls in floral dresses pushed their bikes around campus, calling out to each other in Flemish. My life in Melbourne paled in comparison.
