Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

After she’s gone I have a shower, make tea and put on calming music. This is my usual healing ritual. Once it’s dark, I’ll go down the street to replace her bread and cereal.

  While I’m waiting, I write in my diary. There’s a lot to get down, and for the next hour I type manically, spewing it all onto the page.

  I write a lot about work, and the knock-off drinks which start when my shifts do. I write about what drugs I’ve taken and who I’ve kissed. Who I’ve slept with and where, in which stranger’s apartment, backyard, abandoned car park. I confess my guilt about one Sunday with the family, when I forced down lasagne despite having taken amphetamines.

  I write about how I’m scared to cross the city to get to uni, because I can’t handle the gauntlet of fast-food temptation, or the prospect of running into anyone I know on campus. In daylight, you can see the popped veins in my neck, and the weeping scabs beneath concealer that is now too dark for my washed-out complexion.

  I calculate the exact amount of money I’m flushing down the toilet and the extra shifts I’ll do to compensate. I decide there’s no point in going to uni, as I just end up sleeping in the lectures. I’m getting sloppy, and almost killed a rabbit in pharmacology when I miscalculated a dose by tenfold. I showed up late, in pyjamas, to my Spanish exam. I’m behind on everything. Unreliable. A joke.

  I write pitiful declarations of unrequited like, for the guy who rejected me on the grounds of my evident ‘problems’. He thinks I might be gay, which seems totally unfair, given the context. Yet even though I want him to be wrong, I suspect there might be truth in what he says.

  I tell myself I have ‘too much on my plate’ to worry about something as flippant as sexual identity. What does it matter who I’m attracted to, if I’m not deserving or capable of a loving relationship?

  In a final fit of melodrama, I write about how I want to cut myself, but can’t, because I’m too much of a slut for the marks to go unnoticed. So instead I dig and scratch at acne until it bleeds, then tell everyone it’s a rash from food intolerance. Another excuse to limit my diet further.

  Once I’ve brought the entry up to date, I drink another bottle of water and keep writing. After heavy binges, I don’t need to pee for hours.

  On a new page, I draw up a detox, exercise and study plan, which details everything from the long list of prohibited trigger foods, to the exact time I’ll exfoliate, floss and do sudokus to repair my broken brain. It’s a blueprint for impeccable vegan teetotalling. Perfectionism at its zenith.

  Looking back at previous entries would’ve revealed a pattern in the rambling contradictions. Madness masquerades as honesty, no longer constructive, but telling in its omissions.

  The truth I cannot see or bear to write is that I don’t want to get better; I want to be ‘properly anorexic’. Bulimia is a weak and wasteful habit that puts me in regular contact with toilet bowls. Simply not eating would be cheaper, cleaner and save me hours each day. It would also make me thin enough. To be taken seriously. To be cute and androgynous and erase any question of being with women ‘by default’ simply because I couldn’t get a man. To draw people’s attention and, at the same time, disappear.

  The second thing I struggle to acknowledge is wanting to be a ‘real lesbian’.

  Of course, it would be easier to be straight, and I’m trying. Probably too hard. But it doesn’t matter how many men I sleep with; the other unsettling feeling keeps creeping back. If I have to be gay, why can’t it be unequivocally so? I’m sick to death of this limbo ambiguity.

  To me, ‘bisexual’ is synonymous with exhibitionism. I hate the leering comments about threesomes and being roped into making out with women for a male audience. I’m tired of trying the same in private and finding they’re suddenly out of their comfort zone. Tired of the contradictions, and how in my own, short-lived heterosexual relationships, my attraction to women is not a turn-on, but a destabiliser.

  Given I’m so adept at lying to myself, self-doubt pervades my every thought. I wonder if it is about exhibitionism after all, the fetishisation of bisexuals and wanting to be attractive. I have an eating disorder, so I must be susceptible. If the media can brainwash me into a level of superficiality about my appearance that overrides my values and better judgement, then couldn’t my sexual desire be equally impressionable?

  Then there’s the question of how much. What percentage do you have to be, to be bi? If it’s not fifty-fifty, is it even worth worrying about?

  I make up all kinds of excuses. ‘Men when drunk, women when high’, and repeat this like a mantra. Women are just fantasy, at most a one-nighter, a furtive pash in a nightclub cubicle. Straight women, that is. Without knowing any ‘real lesbians’, I assume they’d consider me fraudulent. I’m scared of their judgement and their feminism.

  There are other factors. My skin, for example, wouldn’t bear female scrutiny. Women see more, question more and have better sensitivity in their fingertips. Men, in my experience, are rough and undiscerning. Only they can satisfy my unrelenting masochism.

  These are my unarticulated thoughts, as I get dressed, cover my face and neck with concealer and go down the street to the 7-Eleven.

  There, I spend ages inspecting nutrition labels, filling my basket, then putting things back on the shelves.

  In the end, I capitulate. How else am I to fill the manic wakefulness, when I cannot be seen, do not dare to even pick up the phone? I have $30 until my next paycheque, which is enough to replace the stolen food and get a four-pack of doughnuts, two Maxibons, a hotdog and a giant tub of yoghurt. I eat the hotdog on the way home, so it doesn’t stink out the flat.

  Because I’m not sure when my housemate’s due back, I binge at my desk and vomit into double, triple plastic bags, which I drop out of the window to where the wheelie bins are kept.

  2001 – Liquid nitrogen

  In Chemistry, I spend most of the 55-minute period decorating my school diary with razor-backed dragons. This isn’t because I’m bored – the teacher has my complete attention. Ms W, soon to become Mrs M, is eloquent, funny and unconventional. I adore her classes, and the fact she’s been criticised by parents for not being sufficiently ‘exam-focused’ appeals to my repressed sense of anarchy.

  Under the enchantment of her voice, chemical concepts emerge with ease from previously abstract ignorance. Her analogies are so visual that I don’t need to look up at the board to understand them. But if I do, our eyes invariably meet, and I feel like the whole time she has been speaking only to me.

  During experiments, I follow her presence out of the corner of my eye as she flits from group to group checking Bunsen burners.

  After school, I work at a popular fast-food chain, and have a similar fascination with one of the managers. I track his blue shirt around the restaurant and tense up whenever he comes close to me at the cash register.

  One of these infatuations is obvious, easy to recognise as a crush. The other, I choose not to question, so I simply pass it off as admiration.

  2018 – Café con leche

  The lights in the cabin have been dimmed, and the flight attendant is doing a final round before we slip into artificial night. My girlfriend hasn’t bothered with an eye mask or ear plugs, and is dozing next to me while a movie plays out on her screen. After a full month of speaking English and meeting every sphere of my Australian life, she is hecho polvo, made dust.

  Unlike her, I’m wired, and keen to stay awake for as much of the flight back to Madrid as possible. I order a coffee and open my laptop to a fresh document.

  Where my old, handwritten diary used to end up tear-splattered in melodrama, today’s entry is so upbeat it’s cringeworthy. The dominant theme is gratitude. Not just for the person sleeping beside me, nor for the warm reception we received in Melbourne. But for coming through, and the relative ease of coming out. My family and friends were enthusiastic and natural about my unprecedented presentation of a female partner, indeed any partner, something I’d never had the conviction to do before.
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  After following the same-sex marriage plebiscite from a distance during the lead-up to our trip, we were relieved not to encounter personally any of the homophobia or frightening ignorance we’d witnessed in the media. I was wrong to have ever doubted my people. Then I remember: it was never them I doubted.

  It’s almost seven years since I left Australia, and the time abroad has mostly been an exercise in unlearning. Language immersion is an effective tool for breaking destructive inner monologues. Cultural differences forced me to let go of control and opened my eyes to social conditioning. Having the luxury of time, to read and take an interest in the world, helped me break free of the toxic, cyclical introspection that dominated most of my twenties.

  My girlfriend is a ‘real lesbian’, who’s okay with the fact that I’m not. As a ‘professional feminist’, she has been instrumental in dismantling many of my long-held misconceptions.

  I’m not sure if this relationship has succeeded because she’s a woman, because she’s uniquely her or because I was ‘in a good place’ when we met. Although having a partner shouldn’t be necessary to validate oneself or one’s identity, I can’t deny it’s helped.

  It’s a long way to Madrid, and even there I won’t be home. There’s still so much more unpacking to do. But despite the uncertainties, we’re optimistic about our future. In either world, or in both.

  Silence and Words

  Aron Koh Paul

  When I realised I was in love for the first time, I marked the day in my adolescent diary with a single blank page. In those volumes I never shied away from recording my thoughts about everything, from world affairs to the state of breakfast. The year was 1995 and I was seventeen. At the bottom of the page, where I liked to note the music I was listening to that day, I wrote the song ‘Have I the Right’ (to love you) – my musical tastes in those days didn’t move much beyond the 1960s. The empty lines above were the only answer I knew then how to give.

  On every other subject I was precocious. My VCE English teacher accused me of being florid. ‘You write as if you’re Francis Bacon,’ she said, dragging on a cigarette in her smoke-filled car on the way to see a David Williamson.

  In this florid tongue, I wrote long letters to my best friend, Matt. I kept a draft of one. In it, I wrote about Plato, about literature and philosophy, about the weather, politics, our plans for saving the world. I said nothing about love. He never wrote back. He wasn’t the literary type, he said. ‘I keep all your letters to me,’ he told me on the phone, ‘because one day they will be worth something.’ I don’t know if he realised how much his words could sting me.

  *

  When we say goodbye for the last time, we are each at different universities, in different cities. In the final two long years of school together, we took to calling ourselves ‘the survivors’. In his parting speech, our headmaster told us that our school years would be the happiest of our lives. For some, it became truth. What a lie and a curse, it seems to me now.

  We spend hours on that last night revisiting our teenage conversations as we sit in my room at college under the giant poster of the Lady of Shalott that I’ve pinned to the wall above my bed. ‘What the hell is with that?’ he asks. ‘I’m into Pre-Raphaelites,’ I say. Like Anne Shirley, I can recite the Tennyson poem by heart, without thinking too hard about why it means so much to me, as if I’m living the curse of unrequited love without realising that my life is just a nineteenth-century literary rehash.

  We shake hands when I see him to the tram. I really want to hug him, but I resist the things I really want, afraid of the response. Love is easier as a dream. I watch the tram disappear, his profile in the window looking straight ahead, having said nothing I really wanted to say. ‘You were always so good with words,’ his father tells me only a year later, when he asks me to speak a eulogy at his son’s funeral.

  *

  As a child I had always wanted a friend. My first year of school – I have a photo of me grinning broadly in my blue Sandringham Primary School pullover, carrying my red plastic lunchbox – I had two good friends, Adam and Nicole (Nicole had a trampoline). In one photo, I stand between them wearing paper hats at my sixth birthday party at McDonald’s. I got a brand-new Malvern Star with training wheels – I remember hurtling downhill on the footpath with my mother running beside me. We went kite-flying on the Sandringham foreshore around the white rotunda.

  I had enemies too. Two boys who ran around me in the playground calling me ‘Japanese–Chinese’. I told them they were stupid for not knowing that China and Japan were two different countries. Mum told me they were only teasing me out of jealousy. Also, I was Aussie–Iban, a completely different mixture.

  In another photograph, which my mother took when I was around four, she has dressed me in a ‘Sarawak: Land of Headhunters’ t-shirt that falls to my feet, and posed me standing on the bed with a raised wooden shield and spear. I look uncertainly at the lens. There were no digital retakes back then.

  In 1983 we went to Sarawak chasing my father and mother’s dreams, to live with my father’s family, a five-hour boat ride up the Rajang River in a house surrounded by jungle and plantations. My mother told me it would be like The African Queen. I imagined her as Katharine Hepburn among the natives, and me as Humphrey Bogart. Instead of the puffing steamboat, there was a motorboat with overpowered air conditioning and hyper-loud kung-fu movies. My mother dyed her hair blonde so she would stand out more – there’s a photo of her golden halo in the midst of the congregation in the little blue timber Methodist church. My younger sister and I are seated on either side of her. I look as unhappy as I do in almost every photograph from these childhood years. I don’t belong here, the photos scream. I refused to go to Iban class because, I said, ‘I’m Australian.’ The vision I held of Australia was one of belonging, but that life had been put on pause – the bicycle rusting away, the kite grounded, the model boat I started building with my father on one of his visits sitting unfinished in a box on top of the cupboard.

  When the other boys at the local high school wanted me to show them mine if they showed me theirs, I walked away. They wanted to know if it was true that ‘white men’ are uncircumcised, and wasn’t I curious to see theirs too? Boys walked about the school innocently holding each other’s hands, and I stayed among the clever girls. One of the girls wrote me letters that I never answered. I only wanted a friend like me – though I didn’t really know what I was like. I liked opera, musicals, political discussions, Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. My mother read romance and crime novels for hours while I lay on the floor, drawing maps of my own fantasy worlds, which gradually took over the whole lounge room. My mother read to escape, and I scribbled to do the same. On other days I read my mother’s anthropology and history books, pausing to trace the images of naked Greek statues with pencil and paper. When the New Idea magazines arrived from ‘home’, I secretly cut out the male underwear models and kept them in a locked box under my bed.

  When we came home, I was not yet fifteen. I went to a country school where everyone asked me where I was from and mixed me up with the Thai exchange student. A quiet sandy-haired boy used to talk to me about growing tomatoes and write me letters about Jesus. My best friends were the two old librarians. I would sit at the piano in the hall outside the library and play them ‘The Blue Danube’. I always got along with old ladies, like Great-Aunty Irene, who travelled the world in a steamship, collecting teaspoons from every port. We got along so well that the night she died her ghost appeared at the end of my bed. She probably knew more about me then than I did. She gave me a glass turtle and a musical box that played ‘The Music Man’. We watched the Charles and Diana wedding together on her bed, and I used to race home after school to watch Monkey Magic there too and pretend the puffy pink satin doona was a cloud I was flying on. The Australia I came home to was different, of course. Monkey Magic had been cancelled. Paul Keating was the prime minister everyone hated because he was privatising everything. The morning after he
lost the 1996 election, the Labor-supporting Lebanese milk-bar owner told me that Keating lost because of people like me. He meant Asians. Pauline Hanson had just been elected to parliament on a mission to stop us swamping the country.

  Maybe difference had become a habit after so many years not fitting in. But even the principal failed to tell me apart from the exchange student sometimes. The country teachers didn’t know what to do with me, so they sent me to the library to study on my own while the other students were acting up. One day, we had to give talks about a historical figure. Everyone else wanted to fit in, to not stick out, to be cool, and they wrote short paragraphs that made it clear they didn’t care. I gave a long speech about Otto von Bismarck and the Concert of Europe. To calm my nerves I stared the whole time at the most beautiful blonde girl in the class, as if I was talking directly to her. She smiled back, encouraging me. Now I think about it, maybe she was embarrassed, but at the time I couldn’t tell. Later that day her boyfriend wrapped me up in sticky tape in metal-working class. When I told Matt this story a year and a bit later, he said, ‘What was his name? Me and my mates will go and mess him up for you!’

  When I first saw Matthew, he was arriving at the boarding house with his parents. He wasn’t anything like me. I was on a scholarship, and he was the son of an Old Boy. He was always grinning as if he’d just broken something. There was a rumour of some trouble in Canberra, for which he had been sent down to Melbourne to escape. White skin, red lips, roses in his cheeks, black hair that fell over his forehead when he hadn’t brushed it back under his New Yorkers cap. I have two drawings I made of him in profile as he posed. I drew the dissected mice for his biology homework too. He wanted to be a marine biologist, or a mafia boss. He said his favourite film was Pulp Fiction. I didn’t watch those kinds of films. His father was a lawyer and his uncle was a priest, so he said he’d probably have to study Law. His mother part-owned a racehorse. When my mother came down from the country for the parents’ night, she wore her most elegant scarf and parked our old bomb around the corner so nobody would know we were ‘poor’.