Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  I was raised surrounded by jokes about how the Ancient Greeks started the ‘gay thing’. It now seems obvious that if homos were banging in their togas as far back as BC, then being gay is a natural phenomenon. But when everyone around you is telling you something different, their opinions tend to become contagious and to override pragmatic thought. When I visited the pantheistic Greek island of Delos, I was surprised to find more dicks than I’d ever seen crudely drawn on a high-school desk. Not nude depictions on a statue or painting, I’m talking oversized sculptures of an erect penis on a pedestal. I kid you not. They literally put the D on a pedestal. The Ancient Greeks didn’t just love dick, they worshipped it.

  It was after this trip to Greece when my Buffy obsession transitioned into an obsession with Greek philosophers. I read Plato’s parable about the origins of humans from the Symposium. Each had four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. They came in three genders: man, woman and androgyne (which had both male and female genitalia). Each of these three was split in half after inciting the gods, and the halves were then destined to spend their lives searching for the other: their soulmate. Men searched for men; women for women; and the male and female half from the androgyne for each other. After reading that story I was forever changed. Where Buffy had helped me accept that being gay didn’t mean being alone in high school, Plato helped me believe that homosexuality was normal. Faggots had love stories too – two male halves searching for their lost lover. There’s something powerful and truly life-altering about hearing an ancient story that allows you to feel valued for being just as you are.

  Faggot is more than a word for me; it represents a journey of self-love. Now when I speak the word, I have no fear of conjuring any bigots, nor am I bound by the tar-like feeling pulsing through my veins when it was used against me. In hindsight, the word was a gift when inflicted upon me, because now I can use it to heal.

  The word ‘wog’ was once an open invitation for my dad to smash his fist into someone’s face in the schoolyard, but now being labelled a wog is celebrated. Why can’t the word ‘faggot’ evolve as well? It’s already undergone a journey from originally describing a bunch of sticks, to being fashioned into an insult in North America for a fella with a penchant for dicks, before that new insult-meaning spread throughout the Western world. I couldn’t tell you how much it would’ve changed things for me when I was younger if one of my idols who didn’t fit with the clichéd gay stereotype had stood up and proclaimed themselves a faggot, without malice, with only pride and joy in their heart. It would’ve been so refreshing to see the intention of the word reversed and reclaimed.

  I’ve been known to upset people with soft skin in some circles. A friendship with me is initiated by a verbal baptism by fire. People often misunderstand when I steal words that others have used against them in the past, words with a burden of trauma and insecurity, and attempt to recycle them in an endearing or playful context. I hope I can convince those gentle souls that I am one of them too, that I’m on their team, that I’m trying to strip the malice from the word, to take it back. Like Plato did for me, I’m trying to show them that I see their difference; I’ve embraced it and I want to celebrate it with them. I want to transform the intention behind the word and use its power to heal.

  I recall the moment I felt truly celebrated in Australia for my difference. In 2017, on the evening the ‘Yes’ result in the Australian plebiscite for same-sex marriage was announced, I found myself at the official street party in Melbourne. It was held on Lygon Street – which has belonged to the wogs for so many years. I danced with a group of mates, ignoring the rain and soaking up the joy radiating from the sea of strangers smiling, laughing and screeching around me. We were the happiest faggots in the world. And in that moment I was proud to actually feel that there was absolutely nothing wrong with that.

  So You Wanted Honesty . . .

  Sue-Ann Post

  This is a photo of me and my best friend from church. I like to call it ‘Tomboy and Not-a-Tomboy’. Don’t be fooled by my dress: it was Sunday, so I had to wear it. No points for guessing which one is me. It would only be better if my fists were clenched and one of my socks were halfway down.

  They say that the past is another country, but I’ve still got my passport. I grew up in rural Australia in the 1960s. The only phones were big black Bakelite rotary-dial landlines. Television was still in black and white and we only had two channels. There were no drink-driving laws, seatbelts weren’t compulsory, you could still smoke in hospitals and it would be another twenty years before homosexuality was decriminalised. Throw in a fundamentalist Christian upbringing and I had not a single clue that gays and lesbians even existed. I’m part of (hopefully) the last generation of kids to grow up thinking they were the first, or indeed the only ones to be attracted to the same gender. It was a profoundly lonely experience.

  I didn’t find out that homosexuality existed until I went to college at eighteen. And it wasn’t the best introduction, as it came courtesy of my Abnormal Psychology textbook. There in Chapter 11, ‘Psychosexual Disorders: Gender Identity Disorders and the Paraphilias’, after incest, paedophilia, voyeurism, sado-masochism and rape came homosexuality. I cannot begin to describe the shockwave that hit me when I read the definition. My first thoughts were, You mean it’s real?! It’s an actual thing? There are others like me? Where are they? Can I join the club? Sadly, that was followed by an intense, internal fundy-Christian backlash that had me wrestling my demons and desperately praying not to be gay for the next two years.

  After that, I gave up. I accepted that I was a homosexual and came out to pretty much everyone I knew. Despite the fact that I had never even kissed a woman or met an actual lesbian. I just knew it was true. With apologies to ’80s band Hot Chocolate, it doesn’t start with a kiss. It starts with a look and your stomach doing backflips. You don’t need to kiss someone to know that you are attracted to them. When I came out, my friends were surprised, my family was shocked! Horribly, horribly shocked!

  I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that I had never heard of homosexuality until I read that textbook. Except, it wasn’t really like that. My friends were surprised it had taken me so damn long to figure out what I was. They’d guessed years ago. My family, especially my brothers, were shocked, but as for my mother claiming to have had no idea, well, I’ll get back to her later. The truth is, all sorts of homosexual references had been floating around me the whole time, but they were in code and you had to read between the lines. Although the words ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ were never spoken, there was a constant sneering cultural disdain for sissies, nancy boys and old ugly spinsters who couldn’t catch themselves a man. A fake lisp and a limp-wristed wave conveyed all the contempt needed, without using actual words. And that contempt ran through pretty much all of society. Gay and lesbian themes appeared only rarely in films and on television, usually in subtext, and they always ended badly. The Hays Code for film censorship in America may have officially ended, but the hangover carried on for decades. Among other things, the Hays Code had decreed that homosexual relationships could not be depicted as happy, healthy or successful, so for decades there were only four ways for a gay relationship to end: murder, madness, (straight) marriage or suicide. I think of them as the Four Horsemen of the Gay Apocalypse. It took until the 1980s for a film about lesbians to have a happy ending. (It was Desert Hearts, if you’re interested.)

  I may have completely missed all the subtle references and subtext, but evidently people around me were more aware. Even in high school, girls walking past me in the hallways would hiss words at me. From the tone of delivery, I knew they were intended to be insulting but I had no idea what ‘lemon’ or ‘lezzie’ meant. One time they hissed the word ‘lesbian’ at me and I foolishly asked my mother what it meant because I couldn’t find it in a dictionary. She slapped me and told me to never use that word again. And here comes the truly odd thing. When I said earlier that I had no idea homosexuality even existed, i
t’s a tad more complicated than that. It seems my subconscious was trying to protect me from cognitive dissonance by grabbing uncomfortable memories almost as soon as they were formed and stashing them away in a locked file that I wasn’t able to access till years later. That memory of my mother slapping me when I said the word ‘lesbian’ was one that quickly disappeared. Another one was even more astonishing. At a high-school party I attended, two couples were sitting cross-legged on the floor opposite each other, making out. One of them said, ‘Hey, let’s swap,’ and suddenly the girls were kissing each other and the boys were kissing too. Not that I really noticed the boys; I was absolutely fixated on the girls. It was completely mind-blowing, but that memory was captured and locked away before I even walked out the door to go home that night. It only returned when I came out four years later.

  It is one of the great oddities of life that as you get older, you realise the past is not fixed, that ripples of various historic events are still moving through our culture. Looking back with new eyes can completely change the way you perceive the past. One small example: all my female teachers in primary school were called ‘Miss’. None were married. Then one of my teachers got engaged to one of the other teachers at the school and I was shocked at how angry the other female teachers became. She was virtually ostracised. It was only years later that I realised it was because she was one of the first female teachers to be allowed to marry. Until 1966, by law, married women weren’t allowed to work in government jobs, so if you wanted to be a teacher or a nurse you had to stay single. My teacher was one of the first to take advantage of the change in the law, and the resentment of the other, older teachers was palpable.

  A more personal revelation came when my gaydar was officially installed, shortly after I came out. I looked back over my life and one incident in particular completely shocked me. When I was sixteen, another member of my church suddenly started attending our branch despite the fact that it was a long drive from where she lived. She always brought her teenage son along, and she and my mother constantly threw the two of us together. We ran Junior Sunday School together. We went to church socials together. We were cast in a play together. It didn’t last long – they eventually went back to their local church branch – but later in life my gaydar kicked out a reading and I realised, ‘Oh my god. He was gay! And not just a little bit. He was as camp as a row of tents! He was Thorpe-ingly gay!’ Despite my mother’s protestations that she had no idea I was a lesbian, she quite obviously had suspected something and had conspired with this other woman to throw their two ugly-duckling queer kids together in the hope of creating the beautiful swan of heterosexual marriage. It failed.

  Despite all the confusion, doubt and fundy-Christian pushback in my brain, I came out as a lesbian in 1984. A few years later, I moved to Sydney, where I was enthusiastically embraced by the gay community and felt at home for the first time in my life.

  Except, it wasn’t really like that. My first trip to a lesbian bar was a thoroughly disheartening and depressing experience. I rocked up wearing a jacket and tie because I thought that was what all lesbians wore. I stood at the bar, ordered a drink, glanced around the room and . . . nothing. No one looked at me. No one spoke to me. I was too shy to approach anyone so I just sat there and was completely ignored. Half an hour later, a huge fight broke out and just like back in the schoolyard, everyone gathered around and shouted encouragement. ‘Kick her, Deidre! Harder!’ I fled the bar and got a taxi home, thinking, What the hell? Is that what I’m meant to be like? Are these my people? I didn’t understand the night at all. I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong. But then, I didn’t really know anything about the community. It’s not like they held orientation days for new lesbians or handed you a manual. I thought it was me. I thought I was just as unattractive to lesbians as I had been to boys. After all the drama and trauma of coming out, I felt as lonely as ever. It kind of broke my heart a little bit.

  It took me a few years to figure out what had happened. It turned out my outfit had a lot to do with it. The Sydney bar scene in the mid-’80s was still very much about the butch/femme dynamic. By wearing a jacket and tie I had signalled that I was a butch. The unwritten rules for butch/femme interactions were that butches did not approach other butches (‘Are you crazy? That would be like two men going out!’) and femmes also did not approach butches. Butches had to put in all the effort. I had no idea about any of this and if anyone had asked me, I would have said, ‘But I’m not butch. I’m a big old tomboy and I want to romp with other big old tomboys.’ Being attracted to butches rather than femmes didn’t fit within that dynamic, so sadly I have never picked up at a lesbian bar. Such a shame, really, because as my partner of twenty-three years always says, ‘I like my men to be men and my women to be somewhere in between.’

  To be fair, it wasn’t all the bar culture’s fault. When it comes to flirting with women, I can be as dense as a Queensland Liberal politician. I had already started doing comedy and was garnering notoriety as one of the first ‘out’ comedians in Australia. Early in my career I often referred to the ‘short hair and comfortable shoes’ lesbian stereotype, and after one gig I was approached by a rather stunning woman with long red hair who smiled at me and said, ‘You know, not all lesbians have short hair.’ My response? ‘Well, of course you’re right and I probably shouldn’t perpetuate the stereotype.’ I blathered on for a bit, and then she walked away. Sometimes I am such a fricking doofus, even I can’t believe it.

  As I soon discovered, being the only out lesbian on stage was a double-edged sword. My first paid, professional gig was an all-women cabaret at the Trade Union Club and the response was overwhelmingly positive. My second was a week later at mainstream comedy venue the Harold Park Hotel, where after the gig an extremely angry lesbian stalked past me and hissed, ‘You sellout!’ Seriously? My second bloody gig and I was already a sellout? And from there, things just got weirder over the years.

  Some women thought I wasn’t lesbian enough and should stop talking about it on stage. Some thought I was too lesbian and would just confirm the stereotype and scare the straights. It was even suggested that I wait till a ‘shorter, prettier’ lesbian comedian came along first. Some angrily questioned whether I had the right to speak on behalf of all lesbians, a right I had never, ever presumed. Hardcore lesbian separatists were outraged that I said anything at all about lesbians in front of male audiences. New Age lesbians disapproved of me because I ‘used too much masculine energy’ on stage. I may have been picking up awards and playing sold-out houses in mainstream clubs, but lesbian nightclub gigs turned out to be nightmares. Once I followed two straight female comedians, who the crowd loved, but when I came on they started yelling ‘Get off! Put k.d. lang back on!’ I did a gig in the back room of a suburban pub for a crowd of closeted suburban lesbians who flinched every time I said the word ‘lesbian’; within five minutes they’d turned their backs on me and started playing pool again. The last time I was interviewed on a gay radio station, I was kind of stunned when one of the hosts said to my face, ‘’Cause really, you’re not the best comedian in the world. But you’re a good role model.’ Even sadder, I no longer accept lesbian-only gigs unless I know the group or at least the organiser, because the last time I did one, they tried to sue me for breach of contract. They said my performance was ‘offensive to lesbians’. Now that was a real kick in the guts. In my darker moments, I fear that the legalisation of homosexuality has led to the boganisation of homosexuality.

  But you know what? I don’t care and it doesn’t bother me. Well, maybe it does a bit, but I knew that most women are batshit crazy long before I became a lesbian. I embrace the crazy and run with it. I started doing comedy in mainstream venues because there was no real gay circuit. I didn’t set out to be a role model or lead a revolution. I was just a big doofus tomboy lesbian who liked to make people laugh. People said I couldn’t be ‘out’ and have a career in comedy, and that was a challenge I was more than willing to accept. I’m not
everyone’s cup of tea and that’s fine by me. My fans are as weird and wonderful as I could possibly want. For every awkward or horrible gig, there has been an equally awesome and amazing gig. I’ve performed at the Opera House! Twice! (Three times if you count the time I performed there in a Mormon children’s choir, but that’s a whole other story.) In the thirty-four years since I came out, I have seen the queer community go from the butch/femme nightclub scene run by the mafia (they were the only ones willing to take our money), to mainstream acceptance and, bugger me, gay marriage. Who would have thought! And what a wild ride it has been.

  As nice as it is to live in an era of acceptance and (notional) equality, there are some relics of the previous era that I would be sad to see disappear. I am (still) a tomboy, and I know some people now disapprove of that term and wouldn’t mind if it disappeared, but please don’t be too quick to ditch it. The idea of ‘tomboy’ runs through most cultures and has been around for at least six centuries, but probably longer. My favourite definition comes from the Wordsworth Concise English Dictionary: ‘a high-spirited romping girl’. That was me. I romped and wrestled and played most of the sports that girls were allowed to play. I hated wearing dresses, climbed every tree in our garden, and occasionally beat up boys who hassled my friends. In primary school, when a teacher came to fetch the boys to move chairs in the assembly room, I was usually invited along as well. When we practised dancing for an upcoming school social, there were always more girls than boys and I always danced as a boy to make up the numbers. Always. To this day, I still don’t know how to dance backwards like a lady.