by Benjamin Law
*
I was still half asleep the morning Lise showed up at Annelien’s door. Lise spilled into the room, her clothes full of holes, talking a mile a minute about how she’d failed half her exams and her dad was going to kill her. She had masses of hair and a ready laugh. She was breathtaking. I yanked my nightie down, covering my nakedness. For once, I kept my mouth shut.
Later, as Annelien and I tucked my mattress out of sight for another day, I fished for information. I found out that Annelien had been friends with Lise since moving to Antwerp two years earlier. Annelien also told me that Lise had had a crush on a girl while on exchange, and that she, Annelien, had been sworn to secrecy; but she could tell me because what role was I going to play in Lise’s life?
I knew I was in trouble the afternoon we walked around the dock. Antwerp is a port city, and a fleet of old sailing ships had berthed for the week. We met up with Lise to walk the water’s edge, looking at the ships but not really looking. For the first time since I’d met her, Annelien couldn’t get a word in edgeways. Lise and I bounced off each other with fizzing energy. I gathered more titbits of information: Jewish, single-parent household, fluent in five languages, always flunking exams. She made my stomach flip.
We were nearly home, the shadows of the brick terrace houses stretching long on the cobbles, when Lise asked what I only found out later was her benchmark question: who was my favourite musician? I answered without hesitation: Jens Lekman, Swedish pop-folk crooner, and top-ten reason not to kill myself when being a bespectacled gay scholarship kid had felt like a burden too big for my weedy shoulders.
Jens Lekman? Lise loved him. She was especially into his 2005 EP compilation. How did she feel about Michael Bublé? She would rather poke her eyes out with a fork.
So you see, I was in trouble.
*
Annelien left town with her sporty family for their summer holiday. Would I be alight alone in her room in Antwerp for three days? She promised to ask Lise to look after me while she was gone. We’d got on so well that time we walked around the port, that time we went to the movies, the trip out to Lise’s family home in Essen, that time we drank beer until the early hours. We were already such good friends! Would it be okay?
I said it would be okay. I resolved to play it cool. I did not succeed.
Our first date was only one in hindsight. I invited Lise to visit the contemporary art museum with me. It would’ve been great if either of us gave a shit about contemporary art. I was sweating in my jeans that were way too hot but made my bum look reasonable. Lise bought some cake to share and it tasted like stale sawdust. It was hands down the best date of my life.
That evening, we cooked together, orbiting around each other while chopping vegetables in the kitchen of her tiny studio, unspoken things swirling between us. Lise’s friend Sidney arrived with fresh berries from her mum’s garden, and booze. We drank it all, then bought more. We stumbled to a gay bar where Sidney stole the candle holders and Lise and I pressed up against each other in a dark corner.
We didn’t sleep together that summer. We didn’t even kiss. I was twenty and had a girlfriend back home. A girlfriend who liked Michael Bublé, but a girlfriend nonetheless.
Our three days evaporated in a tangle of guilt-tinged arousal. Three days was at once both brutally short and long enough to realise that this thing right here was unlike anything else in the world. Once our days were up, Lise put me on my train to France. My cheeks became wetter as the landscape dried out. I met up with my parents in Paris, and we travelled to the middle of the country together. I used all my pre-paid credit calling Lise, clutching the phone like a portal back to where I’d left my insides.
The wedding was beautiful. The population of rural Anzy-le-Duc, the bride’s home town, almost doubled for the weekend. Our sprawling family filled every chambre d’hôtes in Saône-et-Loire. Mangled French and broken English combined to broker an understanding between the two clans. The party went for two days and two nights. I switched from French to English and back again. I was neither here nor there.
I flew back to Melbourne after the wedding. I broke up with my girlfriend the night my flight landed. She picked me up from the airport and had made me the most beautiful homecoming gift. She had had her hair cut especially. I felt like a cruel piece of shit, but I also felt free.
*
It would take me a whole year to make it back to Belgium. I postponed uni, got a second job, turned down expensive nights out. I sent Lise lollies and books in the mail. I used my tax-return money to buy a laptop and fell asleep with it in my bed, Lise’s voice easing me into slumber. I treated every shift pouring Belgian beers for handsy, red-faced old men as another step towards a beer with my own Belgian.
My parents were reluctant to see me go. It was ridiculous, farfetched, a stupid waste of my time. Also, why was I still persisting with this gay business? My friends were also reluctant to see me go. What if I my heart got broken? What if she was an appallingly bad kisser?
My university was the most reluctant of all – not through any particular affection for me or concern for my wellbeing, but because they couldn’t be arsed doing the legwork. But I was persistent to the point of obnoxiousness. I pestered the exchange office for months until they finally relented. Fine, they eventually said, I could go to Belgium. Fine, I could count it as an exchange. But no, they wouldn’t help me with the paperwork. It didn’t matter to me, though. I was going.
*
I landed in Belgium expecting another sweaty summer, but instead touched down into rain and chilly winds. This time it was Lise who picked me up from the station. She held my hand so gently and smiled so shyly. She was shorter than I remembered. She was perfect.
That year in Belgium was magnificent and terrifying and exhilarating. For the first time in my life, I had my own sun-drenched room, my own shitty kitchen. Annelien and Lise’s friends lent me sheets, plates, pots and pans. Those friends slowly became my friends. I got chubby on fries and beer, and flunked French. I learnt some Flemish, and wandered through the Harry Potter halls in my own floral dresses. Mostly, though, there was Lise. Lise at dinnertime, Lise on Christmas morning, Lise getting up to pee in the middle of the night and then crawling back into bed, snuggling into my nook. That year made us real. It was a good year.
That year was followed by another good one, and then another after that. We were long distance, and then we weren’t, and then we were again. Sometimes it was hard. Sometimes we pissed each other off, had no money, didn’t understand each other’s cultural point of view. Occasionally it felt like too bloody much.
But like Annelien all those years before, our love has stuck. When people ask how long we’ve been together, the number sounds strange to me. We have become one of Those Couples. We have friends who have met, married, had children and split up in less time. We’ve had shitty jobs, shitty haircuts, shitty housemates. Loved ones have passed, and babies have been born. Annelien has even had two. They have her hair and her husband’s smile (yes, still the same boy).
We’ve bounced back and forth between our countries and visited a few new ones in between. We’ve seen each other through surgeries, homesickness and a gruelling bout with the Australian immigration department. One day soon Lise will be an Australian citizen. They’re going to give her a tree to plant, but her roots have been growing in this soil since the night we lay on her futon, buzzing with vodka and wonder, and just looked and looked. When Australia voted for marriage equality, we danced to John Paul Young, both of us soggy and frizzy in the rain. I cried while drunk on cheap cider and she held me tight.
We live in the same place now. We even have a lease. We own a coffee table and a stick blender. Somewhere among the long distance, the books read and the meals cooked, we’ve become adults. Despite all of that, I still feel free.
*
My queerness was born in a hot dry land that was never ceded. It took its first steps in underground parties in disused warehouses, eyeing cute girls o
n the cross-river bus and getting frisky in the back rows of Cinema Nova. It was born Australian, but along the way it veered off course. It’s grown strong on a jumbled diet of pavlova and pralines. Its ‘heaps good’ is sprinkled with some ‘ongelooflijk’ and more ‘ik hou van jou’ than you’d think. It’s drinking beer brewed by monks on a forty-degree day. It stands steady on cobblestones in the rain, and bobs in the waves off the coast of Victoria. Its roots stretch far and deep and are inextricably buried in the soils of two continents. It’s carried within the person by my side, who still holds my hand gently, but no longer shyly. I’m thankful every day that she stuck.
Faggot
Beau Kondos
I wasn’t always a self-proclaimed faggot. With all the homophobic connotations tied to the f-word, I understand why it’s so cringe-inducing, I really do. I’m a strong believer in the potency of words, particularly the idea that the intention behind them cradles their power. My dynamic relationship with the word evolved over time.
In high school I was a typical closeted Aussie-Greek with the unusual habit of never speaking the f-word. Paranoia had dug its claws into me, convincing me that a simple utterance would be too close an association, and would tip-off the homo-police – the bullies who took it upon themselves to make a spectacle out of every limp-wristed, gay-slurring stereotype they could find in the school halls. I gifted the other f-word more liberally to said homo-police (behind their backs, of course, for the sake of self-preservation).
Horror stories of gay wog boys getting booted out of home were constantly doing the rounds. Greek news travelled fast thanks to the insatiable thirst that drove yiayias to watch soapies all day: for gossip, and their obsession with bad boys. These old ladies might have looked innocent, but they had a very real addiction. Imagine if a crack addict was forced to sit through thirty episodes of Days of Our Lives to get their hit? The yiayias don’t have the patience either. That’s why they are stocked up with endless trays of shortbreads and baklava – it’s a culinary ploy to loosen their victims’ tongues and allow the gossip to flow freely. They’ll later use whatever they’ve scavenged and spill the juice to the who’s who of gossip traders at the local Greek Club, who shoot it up at their weekly meet-up.
In Years 7 and 8, these conditions created a conundrum: I yearned to learn more about my emerging same-sex cravings while steering clear of anything that could give the Greek yiayias a quick fix. My parents were the people I trusted and respected the most, so naturally I had the most to lose if they found out and lost their shit.
Yiayias have their sweets and it’s no secret that Greeks in general are feeders. When your stomach is on the brink of exploding from a single serving of yemista or pastitsio that could’ve easily satiated a family of three, the Greeks have done their job. They greet you with a bear hug, and farewell you with that same tight squeeze on your gut: the hug that lasts. That’s how they show their affection, by making sure you feel embraced both inside and out. The burden of Greek shame of gargantuan proportions I could handle, but the prospect of being disowned and losing that double-squeeze shattered me.
So, naturally I turned to television to find the answers. We only had the single monolith boxy TV in the family room. Never mind what the Greeks tell you about Orthodox religion, they pay respects to the holy trinity of kitchen bench, dining table and couch by cooking, eating and vegging out respectively.
Unfortunately, the TV was carefully and centrally placed as a sacred item to be accessed while worshipping the holy trinity, making it near-impossible to sneak a peek at an episode of Queer as Folk. And struggling through prime-time Aussie shows like Neighbours just to get a glimpse of a G-rated gay kiss between men wasn’t an option – that wouldn’t happen for over another decade. Although Will & Grace gave me gays in their thirties to laugh with, none of these shows helped me believe that my cravings were normal – not just my cravings for the big juicy biceps of AFL players, but also the yearning to be held by a dude in a loving embrace. A movie like Love, Simon would have been a godsend, regardless of its unrealistic pitch: Catfish with a Disney filter.
The omission of man-on-man tenderness from mainstream TV when I was young indicated to me that it was something unspeakable and unacceptable. And, because TV was the gospel, I was filled with self-loathing for seeking such tenderness. And that’s why the f-word was so dangerous: it was an admission of abnormality, of being ‘the other’.
While everyone else seemed to be online, it took forever for the tinny crackle and ping of dial-up internet to pervade the Kondos casa: I was missing out on my self-taught beginner’s course of ‘Growing Up Homo at Home 101: Illness or Totes Norm Bro?’ While I was far from the turmoil faced by Sandra Bullock in The Net, online privacy conspiracies engulfed my headspace, which prevented me from searching for gay stuff on the net at the public library or at school. If going incognito on my browser had been an option back then, after furtively searching for two men sucking face I would have braced myself for a fatal diagnosis and dropped in to WebMD to ask: ‘Do my nuts slip back into my body because I’m gay?’ (I mean, why else would my balls go back in after they had dropped, unless I wasn’t man enough? I was too embarrassed to ask my dad in case it set off a glitter canon on his gaydar.) When I was older I discovered that it happens to every guy when their littles mates get cold while they’re hanging out together. Mind. Blown.
The distinct lack of positive representations of men loving one another, combined with the self-censorship of my online searches, left me feeling alone and vulnerable while all these hormones raged for control of and action through my adolescent body. And guess what breed of bloodhound has the uncanny ability to sniff out insecurity in a heartbeat? Spoiler: it’s the homo-police.
In the grand scheme of things, I survived a public high school in the naughties relatively unscathed. The thing about bullied victims is that their trauma is relative – everyone’s pain is the only pain they know and it therefore packs the biggest punch. My bullies’ homophobic taunts mostly occurred when I was alone, sewing seeds of abjection with a facial expression to match. ‘I know you’re gay’ was delivered with that grimace that appears on your face when you realise someone has chucked up in the only cubicle in the nightclub, and you’re desperate to take a dump. ‘Do your friends know you want to root them?’ An accusation delivered with furrowed brows, by the righteous straight hero seeking to protect his vulnerable heterosexual kind (no prizes for guessing that this particular bully now enjoys sex with men, which speaks volumes about projecting internal insecurities onto others). And the impatient ‘Just admit you’re a faggot!’ – which is paired with that look you’d find on the face of a middle-aged shopper just before they ask a casually employed teenager to speak to their manager.
Everyone recalls moments of primal humiliation from childhood. Often it is the witnesses to our mortification that cement the moment and make it real. Some people, sometimes, are easily able to sweep these memories under their medial temporal lobe (I have access to the net now – watch out). But shame is given a boost from the knowledge that witnesses will carry the memory of your disgrace. If a tree in a forest is humiliated and no one is around to hear it, did it really happen? Or is it just bark off a giant sequoia’s back?
After the private exchange of verbal abuse, physical confrontations would follow when the homo-police could corral an audience. I’m not sure if the homo-police were bright enough to realise what they were doing, but it worked. Two indelible moments I experienced of physical bullying were crushing, literally. One of the homo-police ground my hand into the asphalt with the heel of his shoe; another attempted to use the back of my neck as a lemon squeezer, kneading shattered glass into my nape. Oddly, I didn’t nurse traumatic echoes from the physical wounds. These were defining moments not because of what was done to me, but because of how I reacted.
There was no fight. There was no flight. Only pure submission.
These bloodhounds targeted me because I was different, because I was a
fag. In their private verbal confrontations, they made sure I knew that they knew my secret. Then, before an audience, a chorus of shame-witnesses, when the physical attacks happened, I couldn’t fight back because if I did, it would be the catalyst for a further scene: a grand stage for the bullies to broadcast to everyone the faggoty reason I had been targeted, why I had been chosen. What if I risked swinging a punch only to lose the fight? I would’ve been such a fag. No thank you. Take it like a man whose balls can’t even commit to staying dropped. Suffer in silence.
In retrospect, both bullies were a little unhinged – perhaps something intense playing out at home, or something more confronting unfolding in their heads. I heard a rumour that one of them had a brief visit to the psych ward a few years back. Sadly for me, hindsight wasn’t handy at the time the bullies cornered me. Not physically cornered, but detained in a self-loathing-riddled corner of my mind.
Feelings of worthlessness and humiliation reigned supreme. The tone the bullies used when they inflicted that word on me made my heart tighten. My blood felt like it had thickened into a tar-like substance, turning me into the thing they saw me as: dirty scum. I figured that if I felt like scum whenever they used that word on me, I must be scum. It was a simple recipe to cook up a hearty meal of low self-esteem with a side of future intimacy issues. If I had copped a larger helping, it could’ve potentially led to suicide. I was weak and I couldn’t stand up for myself because the bullies were right.
I am a fag.
*
Thankfully, television and movies were my saving grace. Their heartfelt stories drew on the power of metaphor and subtext to make me feel like I wasn’t suffering alone. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was my safe place. I was obsessed. I identified with the protagonist, who had been cursed to be different, ‘chosen’ for something she had no control over. I idolised the strength she cultivated to grow and fight the good fight regardless. Spider-Man was my favourite superhero because he understood the struggle of keeping his double life a secret from those he loved. Both of these hero mythologies gave me scenarios to identify with vicariously, and gracious moments of cathartic release when the hero overcame their obstacles. But though they offered models of coping that helped me accept my fate, they didn’t show me – and hence I still didn’t believe – that being gay was normal.
