Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  Halfway to the hospital, with the poor concussed lad hoisted on our shoulders like a fallen king, Dane recovered enough to argue that he didn’t actually need to go. He was trembling and slurring, but at that point of the night, with the amount of fruity lexia coursing through our veins, who wasn’t? Instead, we went back to the house, babbling with excitement, sporting Dane and his smashed head like an emblem, a trophy.

  *

  I wish that this night was as ridiculous as my memory paints it – but the fact is that at the time I was lonely and closeted and scared. I was seriously attempting to discover who a secret queer boy could be friends with, testing whether there could be a treatise between me and straight men. I held my queerness inside tightly, like a gallstone, like a rapidly developing pearl in a disgusting oyster. In high school, straight males had beaten me up, locked me in a bathroom for eight hours, forced me to move from school to school. I was afraid of men. I didn’t just want their approval and friendship because I was a dumb closeted self-conscious weirdo; I wanted to find the trick to getting them to stop beating me up. This party was a test, which I was pretty sure I was doomed to fail.

  Finally coming out years later was, for me, not so much about gaining the freedom to date men (I was in love with a woman at the time) but about tearing off the final remnants of the ragged cloak of masculinity I’d been wearing as an attempt to blend in. I don’t think it was a massively successful disguise, but it was heavy and burdensome. It felt so good to kick it off.

  *

  When we got back to the sharehouse, we had to kick down the front door. Anna had constructed an elaborate fortress by piling every piece of furniture in the middle of the room, for reasons that we never deciphered. In the kitchen sink, a fire raged. Every door to the house was barricaded against entry. Anna herself was passed out in the corner, wrapped in a curtain. Somehow, in its absurdity, in its elaborate frailness and lack of any utilitarian benefit, the entire night – and Anna’s prank in particular – seemed a fitting metaphor for masculinity, for manliness, for mandate.

  The Equality of Love

  Yamiko Marama

  After the results of the same-sex marriage postal survey, Gina started holding my hand in public. Not just the grab, squeeze and release type of hand-holding either.

  The first time, it took me by surprise. We were crossing the road in Melbourne’s CBD on our way to a movie. The white lines on the bitumen guided our passage, holding off the grumbling traffic waiting as we crossed into the throng of oncoming pedestrians. Gina’s hand curled spontaneously into mine, enveloping my brown hand in its whiteness in the familiar way that it does, as if it’s been moulded for that purpose, protecting me from the chilly Melbourne breeze. Just another day, but not really.

  We’d handled those months in the lead-up to and during the survey differently. I cried. She got angry. I tried to ignore it until I couldn’t and would then find myself crying in the car on my way to work, as I cooked dinner, in the shower. The tears were usually sparked by a reminder of something from earlier in the day: a conversation I’d overheard, a news report that interrupted my morning drive, one of the many articles that flooded my newsfeed. I’d get through my day because I had to, but underneath I felt brittle, a fragile rawness easily opened up by words.

  While I tried to look away, Gina, always curious and probing, would read the comments. The hateful and gratuitous ones people left under articles and opinion pieces posted on Facebook – comments floating in little beige bubbles, unsolicited opinions adjudicating our humanity. Gina would rant and rage to our friends, to her colleagues, to me when we spent time together doing innocuous everyday things like walking to the supermarket. I imagined her alone, still ranting to an audience of herself, unable to turn off the stream in the same way that I couldn’t turn off the tears.

  It’s hard to know what is being in love with a woman and what is being in love with Gina. Before her I’d only had flings or relationships with men. I’d believed myself to be happy – and I still think I was – although perhaps with a little question mark on the end.

  Our romance started abruptly. The first time Gina kissed me we had been walking back to her place along the sand of St Kilda beach, shoes in hand, toes squelching. We were intoxicated and giddy; we had the beach to ourselves, with the stars and sea our only witnesses.

  Things quickly escalated from that first kiss and Gina soon became the fabric of my every day. I made myself comfortable in her home, and it became my home a mere six months later, her routine playing out alongside mine like two arms on the same body. I’m attuned to her habits now: watching breakfast news with a steaming cup of coffee in the morning, the plunger and milk carton sitting like well-behaved children on our carpeted floor. She’s always up before me: I reach out to find she’s left the bed during my attempts to savour the final drops of sleep, but I’m reassured she will be there, on that couch, coffee in hand, as I kiss her and tumble out the door on my way to another day.

  And she’s usually home when I return, although sometimes I’ll beat her and get to watch her sloping through our apartment car park, admiring her confident gait through the kitchen window as I do the dishes, and then greeting her as she comes through the front door, stories bubbling out of her. Later, we relay the events of the day as we walk along the foreshore or juggle dinner plates on our laps, the darkness from outside announcing itself as winter always does.

  My side of the couch in our small apartment is where I perch to put on my boots (my armour) in the mornings before work, and where I lounge in the evenings, the crook of the couch a resting place for my head. It’s the very same spot that I sat when I first entered Gina’s home on the night I told her I’d never kissed a girl before, tentative but emboldened by drink. This would be one of those turning points, a moment with a pre and a post.

  My pre had been comfortable, but like all comfortable things also somewhat small and stiff. I’d been ready to outgrow it, but I hadn’t been sure why or how, and it no longer felt sustainable for me to pack my bags and travel the globe every time dissatisfaction burbled within me. It turns out coming-of-age stories are not only for the teens. I’m a late(ish) bloomer – my queer coming of age happened in my late twenties, at a time when many of my friends were creating whole new, separate life forms whose welfare they are completely responsible for. I still congratulate myself for finding matching socks in my cupboard. I’m still busy exploring my own life, digging around and feeling amused by what I find.

  And so, I fell down the rabbit hole, like Alice, like all people falling in love. And I arrived in an upside-down world where I was required to integrate this new identity – one that felt revolutionary in its authenticity. It was Gina who became my personal handbook to queerdom.

  Gina, on the other hand, had experienced a lifetime of queer adventures: world travels with various ex-girlfriends; booze-soaked nights with lezzo cliques that would rival The L Word for drama; the transformational world of women’s Aussie Rules football, the sport that had been dominated by men but saw the emergence of a whole club, and league, that didn’t really require any.

  ‘You wouldn’t have liked me then,’ she’d say dramatically, as she likes to do, proceeding to relate some kind of debaucherous event she’d been a part of. She’s a storyteller, Gina – not like me, who hides away in our apartment to type words into a laptop screen that looks blankly back. She likes the theatre of it, an audience that she can amuse.

  You could see snippets from these tales on her Facebook timeline: Gina dressed as a pot-bellied Santa at the football club Christmas do, Gina on the piss, making silly faces with her best friend Dawson, Gina at a friend’s hens’ party riding a giant pink inflatable penis. It’s one of the things I like about her the most – her willingness to be playful and juvenile, perhaps because she spent so much of her teenage life missing out on that. There’s a freedom in being able to enjoy yourself, unapologetically, regardless of your age. I too find myself becoming more playful the older I grow.
Worrying about meeting others’ expectations means less when you’ve already announced who you authentically are.

  Being queer, if you’re lucky, means you can dodge certain expectations: getting married, having kids, finding some lukewarm but stable job that will pay for your house deposit in the suburbs. Nothing wrong with all that, should you want it – but maybe you don’t? Instead, you can go to lesbian events on a Sunday night, or a rainbow festival where you dance on a mountain with other queers, the twisted, cindered trees echoing your own movements. And it’s not either/or: you can slip between these queer worlds and the worlds of your non-queer friends, and decide where you fit.

  The ferocious passion of early-days romance can create something like a cocoon: coffee in bed; talking for hours; lounging in sheets that become a kind of personal fort, eyes itchy from lack of sleep, and yet minds wired, invigorated by the compulsion that is early love. It’s a gift when you feel so known so early on by someone, and I was surprised by the detail to which Gina understood me. She could see how being a little different had made me vulnerable to prioritising other people’s needs before my own; she saw a playful side that was often hidden within the responsible person I had always been.

  Living with Gina has given me the confidence to put myself out there, to be outraged, to write, to say no. Below its glittering facades, queer culture is about being who you are, unashamedly. The clichéd gay anthems that we all love to sing at the top of our voices, blissfully ignorant of how bad we sound until we listen to our Snapchat stories in horror later – Cher, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Whitney Houston, Frank Ocean, Queen, George Michael, Prince – often speak to the celebration of us as a community. They’re one of the ways we learn to celebrate ourselves as individuals, which is not something that has been handed to us, but for which we have had to work.

  Looking back, I realise that Gina had initially been cautious, treating me delicately despite her confident and at times brash demeanour. It had been harder for her than it had been for me. She had spoken of getting into relationships with ‘straight women’ who had wanted to dip their toe in but had little interest in weathering the complexity of actually being a queer woman. I realise now that she had actually been giving me an out, early on, perhaps knowing what might be in store for me at a time when I was intoxicated and blissfully ignorant of what that might mean. It was easier for me to see her caution as a relic of old times, given her twelve years’ seniority to me – there wasn’t, I was certain, going to be any alarmist meltdown from me, no massive freakout.

  But once I was faced with my own experiences of homophobia – from the world at large but sometimes even from people who loved me, and in subtler ways than I’d anticipated – I understood Gina’s trepidation. On reflection, it had started right from the beginning, from work colleagues who declared that ‘Yamiko’s not gay!’ when my new relationship was mentioned, as if they’d been privy to some earlier office memo confirming my alleged heterosexuality based on how I dressed or acted. I soon realised that being queer was something of a full-time job: having to correct people’s assumption that you had a boyfriend; being presumed to be straight; overhearing flip and degrading comments about you; having to censor affectionate behaviour with your partner to avoid the leering of certain men; pulling up friends when they were thoughtlessly negative or dismissive. Even, during the period of the postal survey, debating friends who would seek to justify a ‘no’ vote, because they had family members who were voting this way and they thought I should understand why, even as the whole country was allowed an opinion on whether we deserved the same rights as others.

  I found that on occasion Gina wasn’t invited to events, and I had to wonder if particular family and friends were reluctant to explain me and her to everyone else. Gina wore my sadness on the first Christmas I spent without my family, when she had not been invited to Christmas lunch because I refused to label her as a ‘friend’; she forgave me when it took me longer than it should have to stand up to what this injustice signified. It was melancholic, but we still made it special: she cooked a ham, the fat cut up in decorative squares with cloves poking out, and we spent the day drinking Moët on the beach and doting on a little Christmas tree that barely reached our hips. That Christmas, Gina became my family, as we spent that day together, alone.

  I guess she had been through enough of it herself to know. The part of Gina who can change a car tyre, has a truck licence and can fix most things in our house – abilities that to me seem like signs of tough autonomy – created the same Gina who has a long list of stories: events to which she had routinely not been invited as a partner; intrusive questions about her sex life; open discrimination at work; even being threatened by a pack of men on one occasion. All the stories she had accrued in her life as a queer woman, and all the stories she had of friends who had been disowned or kept their lives hidden – these were all real stories with real pain, not overacted television entertainment.

  I couldn’t help but feel guilty about the ease into which I navigated my queerness by comparison, having grown up in a relatively progressive bubble in which it was assumed that you would unconditionally accept people. The shock, of course, is that liberal, middle-class progressives can be every bit as discriminatory as anyone else – they often just have the language to hide it. Obviously, it’s easy to see my naivety in hindsight: perhaps all of us imagine that things will be different for us – that life is not waiting to serve up the big old dose of pain that is the requirement of being human. However, Gina remained patient throughout it all, a steady hand as I dealt with the adjustments; she was likely more irritated at my less-than-adorable habit of leaving wet towels on the ground and my general day-dreaming disorganisation that leaves cyclones of mess behind.

  And if I’m honest, I did have access to many accepting people – close friends, family and confidants who have revelled in the life that I have created with Gina and in our happiness. They have included and accepted her, us, sometimes to a surprisingly – or surprisingly uneventful – extent. Despite the initial difficulties, Gina has been so strongly and proudly adopted and loved by my family, that I sometimes wonder if she’s been hiding within us, all along. Maybe this has, in time, made her less cautious, while I am sometimes more so, as if we have met somewhere in the middle between her initial tentativeness and my cringe-worthy ignorance.

  I wish I could feel as free as I did when Gina and I first started dating, the way that I would snog her on the dancefloor at a straight club, or reach for her hand without thinking – and then feel perplexed when she let go of my hand like it was on fire. But I’m no longer sure that the Yamiko I was back then is realistic in the world that we live in. It amuses me to think that at times I am probably more cautious now than Gina. I feel a slap of anxiety when she does something intimate like squeezing my hand or kissing me while we’re both sitting in a cab. I check to see if the driver is observing us in his mirror. I’m used to being observed now, in this world, and I’m aware of how it exposes you.

  I was surprised when she had reached for my hand, that day in the city, in such a public way and with such a firm, confident grip. She’d shrugged her shoulders in response, as if to say, ‘Well, the majority of these fuckers voted on our lives, and voted in favour of supporting us, so fuck it.’

  My friends talk of ‘home’ as the set of walls they grew up in, whereas mine is with Gina. Even as we sit in our shitty one-bedroom apartment that neither of us own and which we decorate temporarily. It’s amazing to think that I have attached myself to this other person so fiercely in four years, that there is no longer any other home outside of her intimate grasp.

  A City Set Upon a Hill

  Dang Nguyen

  There is a city on the horizon. That’s what I’ve always been told: that far off, in the west, if you look out across Melbourne from the top of a very high hill, or from out of a tenth-floor window, or while you’re climbing a fig tree with your hands all sticky with sap and bugs, you can see a city in the direction
of the sunset shining as bright as winter, as white as light. If you stare unblinkingly, and train your eyes not to water, and focus with your soul, you can make out ivory towers, and a wall like nacre, and pale cathedral spires rising spans and cubits over the buildings below.

  When I was a kid, people held me up to windows and pointed and said, Look, see? Can you see the harbour and the ships like swans, and the starlight on the battlements and waters? Can you see the snowy banners shining in the sunset, and the lamps of crystal? And I would strain and squint and beg them to stop playing tricks on me.

  It got stranger as I got older. People expect toddlers to be stupid and not to get things or see what’s right in front of their faces. It’s a little less tolerable when you’re five, or seven, or nine, and every person you meet can see something white and shining floating in the far-off ether but you can’t. It was like there was a spell that had somehow passed over me, some god or goddess who hadn’t set their sign on my hand or a memorial on my brow.

  We visited Vietnam when I was six. Đại Nam, the Great South, which loomed huge and mysterious in my child-mind, at once the realm of bedtime stories and ancient kings and a place my parents told me we were lucky to have escaped. It was the first time I’d met my cousins, my aunts and uncles and my grandmothers. It was the first time since fleeing the communists that my parents had seen their families and friends and all the loved ones who had peopled their lives before I knew them. I think I was kissed more in that first half-hour at the airport than I’d been in my entire life leading up to that point. Outside, it smelt like Footscray, but a thousand times bigger, weirder, damper. It was my first real experience of humidity, and the tropical air was so wet I could taste it when I breathed.