by Michael Earp
“That’s fair,” she said in Cantonese, smiling. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Mum and I smiled at each other conspiratorially, walking together, arm in arm, as my aunty’s brain quietly rearranged itself.
Coming out as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex or queer can be a massive relief, but it usually also marks the start of having to answer questions from straight people for the rest of your life. Queer people spend a lot of their lives answering questions about themselves. If I’m feeling chatty, I’m happy to engage. Yes, I knew I was gay since childhood. No, I don’t need to have sex with a woman to know I’m gay. There is no “woman” in my relationship … because my boyfriend and I are both men. If I’m feeling tired though – and if the questions make me feel exhausted – I’d rather not be treated as a walking resource for Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Homosexuality But Were Too Afraid to Ask. It’s not my obligation. It’s not my passion. It’s not my job. At best it can be a fascinating conversation in good faith; at worst, it can feel like an interrogation to justify your existence, where most questions eventually boil down to WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS.
It becomes more complicated when the people asking the questions are our family though. People we genuinely care about – those who deserve our time and patience, especially if they’re from another generation. Like Ma-Ma, my grandmother on my dad’s side and my last living grandparent. Even though I came out to my parents and siblings at seventeen, it took another seventeen years to tell Ma-Ma I was gay. This was partly because of cultural and generational reasons, partly to do with age and the fact everyone thought the shock would kill her.
There were also practical language barriers too. Ma-Ma doesn’t understand English. And my Cantonese is appalling. So every time I saw her for seventeen years, I’d take a few steps back into the closet. She’d breezily ask whether I had a girlfriend and I’d say I was too busy for girlfriends. Or my siblings would joke I had a hundred girlfriends, and I’d take the joke further by asking whether Ma-Ma had any new boyfriends. Everyone laughed, but really, it was kind of degrading for all of us.
It was November and we were celebrating my sister’s birthday at a beach house when I finally came out as gay to Ma-Ma. It was time: my boyfriend was staying in the same room with us, and tiptoeing around it felt ridiculous and unnecessary. I also remembered she’d worked with a Thai guy in a kitchen restaurant who was flamingly camp and mincing. Neither of them spoke much English, and because they had no other language in common, their relationship was almost purely physical: he play-flirted with her, and his miming made her laugh. Ma-Ma knew her Thai friend had a husband and would laugh at the silliness of their arrangement. I reassured myself that this was enough evidence to show that if Ma-Ma had been born in another generation, she wouldn’t just be tolerant of gays, but possibly even a fag hag. In any case, I was a grown-arse man now. I could do this.
The sun had already set and it was getting dark outside. As the family broke into separate groups of chatter between the living room and kitchen, Ma-Ma took my hand.
“You’re doing so well with work now,” she said happily. “Now all you need is a girlfriend and to get married.”
We’d arrived at the moment.
“Ma-Ma,” I said, grasping her hand and speaking clumsily in Cantonese in what I imagine must’ve sounded like an inexplicably bad Russian accent to her. “I will not be doing the marriage.”
Ma-Ma blinked, horrified, and slapped my thigh. “What are you saying! Don’t be silly.”
“I be not the silly,” I said in broken Cantonese. “I not liking the women. That white ghost devil over there,” I said, pointing to my boyfriend, “he be my man-love.”
Scott sat across the room with my sisters and Mum, gossiping about something. Mum cocked her head a little in my direct, sensing something change in the frequency of conversation.
Ma-Ma asked a flurry of questions.
“Why are you like this?”
“I was come born like this, Ma-Ma.”
“But this means you’ll never marry a woman.”
“This is a true,” I said. “I don’t want to marry the woman, but.”
“Of course you want to marry a woman!”
“Why, Ma-Ma?” I asked.
“So you can have children!”
I wasn’t sure whether I should point out several of my lesbian and gay friends already raise kids, and that one-in-five female Australian couples have children. We were taking it one step at a time and I didn’t want to overload her.
“I don’t want to be having the children, Ma-Ma.”
Ma-Ma’s jaw dropped. This seemed to be an even bigger shock than the fact I was gay.
“You don’t want children!?”
Hearing our raised voices, my siblings were now making discreet sideway glances from across the room, beer bottles and glasses in hand, probably wondering if they should intervene. Then, because she was asking me so many questions, I asked her one back. Not out of insolence, but genuine curiosity.
“Why is having the children important?” I asked.
“Ai, it’s what you do!”
“Did you want to have the children, Ma-Ma?”
She blinked. Obviously no one had asked her that question before. Maybe it wasn’t a fair question to ask – this was a woman who was nearly ninety, born in a culture and time that was literally foreign to me. She’d lived through wars and famine, migrated twice, became a widower barely out of her teens – experiences I could barely imagine, and for which I had no personal reference. At that moment, I felt that span of time, language and culture between us, and it felt impossible to bridge. Could she have even comprehended a grandson like the one she had? Could she even comprehend the question he was asking her?
“Ai, it wasn’t a matter of ‘wanting’ to; you were simply expected to have them.”
“But why?”
“It’s just what’s expected of you.”
“Why?”
She looked at me, for the first time willing to engage with the idea.
“I don’t know,” she conceded. “You really don’t want to have children?”
“Not really,” I said in broken Cantonese. “I already have many of the children in my life. I love them heaps-lots. Having the children though? It is really expensive.”
Ma-Ma paused and thought about it. “Gum-doo-hae,” she said, which means: “Yes, that’s true.”
Most of us take for granted that the world is supposed to operate in a certain way, and that things that are “typical” somehow equate to “good” or “normal”. Sometimes though it’s healthy to make the brain perform the mental gymnastics it needs to when simply asked, again and again, but-why, but-why, but-why.
Nowadays, Ma-Ma accepts my sexuality and boyfriend. At the same time, Ma-Ma still doesn’t quite understand why being in a committed gay relationship should prevent either of us from still getting married to women and having kids.
Last Christmas, she even asked me, “So he’s still your boyfriend?”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“There’s still no reason why you couldn’t both marry a woman.”
I laughed, realising that was her special “but why?” question; the one I’m still trying to get my head across; the one that’s now rearranging my brain.
Sometimes, though, we need to ask questions of ourselves. Shortly after I came out to my family, my older brother and I were watching a TV show hosted by a shrieky man with a super-camp outrageous lisp. We both winced. My brother – like most Queensland-raised men, I guess – was repelled because men simply aren’t supposed to sound like that. Personally, I was thinking of the mincing queen, “You’re ruining it for the rest of us. We don’t all speak like that.” Yes, I was gay, I kept telling everyone who’d listen. But I wasn’t that kind of gay. Instead of drinking cocktails at the clubs, I drank beer and went to rock gigs. Other gays – the stereotypical gays, I told myself – were club-hopping, feminine
screechers. They were pterodactyls in loud clothing. Honestly? I found them sort of … well, embarrassing. Clichés. Stereotypes.
My brother turned to me. “You don’t talk like that,” he said. “So why does he?”
I didn’t have an answer. However I did count myself lucky that I didn’t sound like the flamer on TV. Even though I was a short, skinny Asian kid, my balls must’ve dropped early on, because when people heard me speak for the first time as a teenager, they blinked in surprise at how low my baritone voice was.
“Your face really doesn’t match your voice,” a classmate told me once.
I took it as a compliment. And yet, I still was paranoid that people could tell I was gay by my voice. When I first left school and started working as a music journalist, I’d have to listen to my own voice over and over when I transcribed interviews. Most people find listening to their own voices disorientating and weird, but for me, the added horror was hearing my voice and feeling I could still detect a definite gayness to it. I’d listen to my voice and study it, learning how to crush all traces of it out.
It took me years to realise that it’s not only homophobic to hate sissy-sounding voices. It’s sexist too. Underneath the homophobia is misogyny – a hatred of women. We really believe that sounding high-pitched, light and giggly – things associated with female voices – needs to be obliterated from the male voice. Maybe, though, it’s that attitude that needs to be obliterated. Homophobia isn’t always just something straight people inflict on us. It’s something we inflict on ourselves. We grow up with so much messaging that it’s wrong to be gay that even once we come out, there’s still residual hatred of certain types of gays. Give it some time and you’ll understand if being gay is valid, every type of gay person is valid too.
Because, in the end, aren’t we all stereotypes in some way? Nowadays, I feel we should all embrace our inner cliché. Don’t be afraid of it. If you’re a mincing homosexual, mince so hard your legs become hamburger meat. And when people think they’ve got you sussed out, it’s not your responsibility to remind them of all the other things that make you a three-dimensional human being. It’s their responsibility to look closer. Nowadays, when I hear the high-pitched shriek of a fellow gay, I don’t recoil. Instead, I think, “Finally. My people.”
When my brother asked me why I didn’t sound like other gays, what I wish I asked him was why he sounded the way he did. After all, when my brother is around other straight men, his voice noticeably changes too. So does his posture and laugh. Around other straight men, he talks about things I never usually hear him talk about. He laughs at bad jokes about women he’d never laugh at around his family and his voice goes deeper and drawlier. So really, it begs the question: why do straight men speak like that?
In Australia, masculinity is associated with a deep voice and basic inability to pronounce words. “Australia” is “Straya”. “Do you reckon” is “dyareckon?” And “Hello” is “owsitgaarrrrrrrn”. If you sound half-drunk while speaking, you’re considered even more manly and respectable. None of this is taken to be a speech impediment. But if you have a lisp, or a high-pitched voice, it’s something to be corrected by a speech pathologist. It took me years before I asked myself the question I’d asked before: Why does it matter? Why should any of us care how people speak? And if you really think there’s nothing wrong with being gay, what’s wrong with sounding gay?
Straight people are never asked questions, but maybe they should be. Like: why do you all dress like that? And what’s the deal with holding gender reveal parties for babies? Do you ever find it weird you don’t get to share each other’s clothes? When did you first know you were straight? Did something go wrong in the womb? Aren’t you afraid that by having heterosexual sex, you might contract the scariest sexually transmitted disease of all – pregnancy? It’s a major health risk that’s killed a lot of people, you know. What I’ve learned is when straight people ask questions of us, the best strategy is to answer it, flip it and ask the same question right back at them. In any case, straight people deserve our curiosity too. After all, they mightn’t think of themselves as exotic, strange and different, but they’re definitely exotic, strange and different to me.
Most of the time, being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex or queer doesn’t especially feel like a superpower. However, I’ve learned that it gives you one default advantage in the world. Perspective.
Whereas straight and cisgender people tend to unquestionably accept the narrative they’re given – that they’ll grow up, fall in love, marry, buy a house together and have children – being queer means we’re positioned to see the world fundamentally differently. We’re wired to ask questions about ourselves and each other. Why does it matter what we look like? Why is it important to have children? What does it matter how we sound? Why does my life have to be like yours?
Growing up and having to question yourself – while everyone else asks invasive and hurtful questions – is painful. At the same time, it also means you’ve asked some of the most important questions before anyone else will. Queer isn’t just a sexuality. It’s a fundamental viewpoint and different way of looking at the world.
What could be more important than that?
As with most books there are many people who need thanking. But first and foremost, I need to thank my editor, Nicola Santilli, who was tirelessly enthusiastic about this idea ever since I mentioned it at Reading Matters in 2017.
Thank you to Danielle Binks, who had my back and gave me great advice.
To the contributors: you are all amazing writers. Thank you for being willing to use your voices to empower LGBTQIA+ youth.
The team at Walker Books, thanks for ushering this thing of beauty into the world.
Jenny Pausacker, you broke boundaries in Australian queer young adult fiction, and this anthology follows yours, even if it’s more than twenty years later. Thank you for paving the way.
Thank you to Lili Wilkinson, Alison Whittaker and Rebecca Shaw for the kind words. You warm my heart.
My writers group: Anna Battese, Michelle Bryceland, Gisela Ervin-Ward, Cat Mojsiewicz and Nean McKenzie.
But most importantly, thank you to the entire #LoveOzYA community, who were so ready to welcome Kindred with open arms. Really, this is for you: the readers.
// agmc.org.au
The Australasian GLBTIQ Multicultural Council is a peak body for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, queer individuals and community groups of multicultural and multifaith backgrounds. Their vision is to live in a world without prejudice and discrimination on the basis of sexuality, sex, gender, race, culture and religion in celebration of our diverse and unique identities. They advocate through research, education and community events.
// www.youthbeyondblue.com or www.beyondblue.org.au
A not-for-profit organisation that works to increase awareness of anxiety and depression in Australia and to reduce the associated stigma. There is specific information and resources for LGBTQIA+ people and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, as well as phone and online support hotlines.
// www.blackrainbow.org.au
A national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBQTI suicide prevention advocacy platform and touchpoint. Black Rainbow is a not-for-profit enterprise that supports Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBQTI people who are homeless, leaving domestic violence relationships or the justice system.
// Google “Gender Dysphoria Clinic” and your state.
Services that help people experiencing gender dysphoria. These clinics can give mental health assessments relevant to gender dysphoria and help with referrals to other supports for gender affirmation.
// ihra.org.au
Intersex Human Rights Australia is a national body by and for people born with variations of sex characteristics. They promote human rights and bodily autonomy, and provide information, education and an online peer support group.
// itgetsbetter.org
This project’s mission
is to communicate to LGBTQ+ youth around the world that “it gets better” and to inspire the changes needed to improve their lives. It uplifts, empowers and connects LGBTQ+ youth around the world.
// kidshelpline.com.au or 1800 55 1800
A free, anonymous and confidential phone and online counselling service for young Australian people aged between five and twenty-five. Kids Helpline is available to talk about big or small concerns.
// www.lifeline.org.au or 13 11 14
A national charity providing 24/7 crisis support and suicide prevention services to people of all ages. An online chat and free directory of local health and community services are also available.
// www.minus18.org.au
Australia’s largest youth-led network for LGBTIQ youth. Minus18 provides peer support, online resources and networking opportunities such as workshops and events.
// lgbtihealth.org.au
The national peak health organisation in Australia for organisations and individuals that run health-related programs, services and research focused on LGBTI people.
// nonbinary.wiki
An education and advocacy network that offers information for and about people who don’t fit the gender binary. This website includes an extensive database of definitions of LGBTQIA+ terminology.
// www.pgdc.org.au
Parents of Gender Diverse Children provides peer support to parents and those parenting trans and gender diverse children. They list resources that are both nationwide and state-specific.
