by Benjamin Law
I choked on the silence and pain, unsure of where to take the conversation. No amount of YouTube videos and queer think pieces prepared me for this moment. But I was not naive enough to think they would. It does not get better. It just gets lost in communication.
Amma interjected. She said that someone she knew had got married – and had separated shortly after. In coded language, she insinuated that she was familiar with my secrets. She asked if I was okay – I was. She asked if I needed to speak to someone – I did not. She thanked me for sharing this part of myself and said I needn’t worry. She dismissed Appa’s sobs and wails, and said that he would get over it.
I felt a sense of calm take over. As I looked out the window of my apartment, the Australian sun’s morning rays seemed to shine brighter with the glimmer of a salvageable relationship. Of course Amma, level-headed Amma, would know how to handle this. Amma, who would run to catch the bus in her $20 wedges to get to her factory job miles away, would again know what to do so we could make it through.
‘Do not tell anyone about this,’ Amma then said.
And just like that, my heart sank to the floor.
There was silence, and in that silence it became clear that private tolerance – even private acceptance – was still public shame.
Amma and Appa now knew my deepest truths, and we were at the brink of a relationship we had never had before that morning. But the fear of stigmatisation, exclusion and gossip fodder would follow Amma and Appa, snapping at their heels like a pack of hungry wolves. That fear would drive them to keep up appearances for Sithappa and Sithi overseas, Oor gatherings, and Kōyil folks, enabling them to continue living their lives in relative peace. I was stupid to think that my parents’ love could not withstand who I loved. It was not them not loving me or accepting me that would keep my love for him a secret. Rather, it was their fear of sharp tongues spitting venom and spreading lies about them, isolating them from their community and shredding their souls, and consequently shredding mine.
My queer identity took me away from not only my family, but also my Tamilness. I had split open the Red Sea, and torn myself away from the world that my parents had built for me stone by stone, and moved to Australia – a land that rejects my Tamilness – trading it in desperation to feed my queer soul. In the blood-orange desert, my queer identity was a battle I could fight alone, wrestling with myself in isolation, saving Amma and Appa from an unnecessary struggle with Tamil society. They’d spent their entire lives fighting for everything else that they had. Who was I to deprive them of the only community they connect with? The only space they have allowed themselves to have so I could grow up free from trauma and with the privilege of choosing to leave?
Now, as I sit in chrome birds suspended in the night sky, memorising the layouts of yellow flickering cities below me, I think about how the person I loved made the same journey across the world to understand where I came from, knowing it was unlikely he would be welcomed with open arms. I think about how he stayed in my old room, felt the manjal between his fingertips, dunked the vadai into the sambar at my best friend’s wedding in a Kurtha – as just my ‘friend’.
I wanted him to experience a fraction of Tamilness the way I had and get to the fulcrum of my straddling identities, to sit through problematic Rajinikanth films with Appa, fall in love with the melodic richness of Anjali, eat roast paan and sambal on my family’s cloth-covered couch with Amma, with the Tamil radio humming in the kitchen and Sun TV simultaneously blaring from the TV.
But even then I could see the wolves nipping at my parents’ door.
When the wheels hit the tarmac, I wonder whether my queer existence will ever be reconciled with the duties of being an only child in the Tamil community. I want to care for my parents into old age, ensuring they feel a sense of belonging, despite having embraced their queer son. How much longer will I betray myself into small silences? Will I ever be able to rejoin Tamil society, having fleshed out my queerness on my own terms, while raising a queer family of my own? Or will I be ground into dust, waiting for someone else to speak?
I dream of creating space and having a queer presence within the Tamil community. I am tired of waiting to be represented. There are queer Tamil activists doing amazing and much-needed work in white spaces. However, I want to weave together my Tamil life and my queer one, because there are undoubtedly many others like me: Tamil society is complex and should be represented as such. As Audre Lorde says, if I don’t define myself for myself, I will be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.
However, I am nervous. To fully embrace my Tamil and queer identities, I need to make myself visible. I need to be visibly Tamil in queer spaces, and dare to be visibly queer in Tamil spaces. I don’t want other people to have authority over my Tamilness or my queerness. I know this community has not been made for me.
But I am not going to apologise for being here. I am not going to apologise for existing.
Radelaide/Sadelaide
Gemma Killen
You are born in 1987, on the fourteenth of June. Your 10 pm arrival makes you a Gemini sun with an Aquarius rising. Basically, you are prone to both vacuous chatter and long bouts of staring pensively out windows, certain that the whole world is about to collapse. This could be because of a perfect spewing of planets across the sky at the exact time of your birth, or it could be because the world is large and your nervous tongue is small but ambitious.
The Queen Elizabeth Hospital is just over the back fence of your parents’ house and Mum waddles over when she goes into labour. You are delivered into the world a full month earlier than expected – impatience is another key feature of your Gemini–Aquarius complexion – so you spend your first days in a box, carefully monitored, gently regulated. When it is all done, Mum waddles home again, a nurse carrying you all the way to the front door. Dad buys a bottle of Gordon’s Dry Gin to celebrate. Mum rolls her eyes.
Depending on who you ask, Adelaide is known as the city of churches or the murder capital of the world. There are certainly a lot of churches – more than five hundred built from stone and sand, and countless more unseen, sacella born of lounge-room piety and furtive glances across classrooms. You are never sure exactly how the city got its murderous reputation, but the halfway point between home and school is marked by the house where a man killed his lover, chopped him to pieces and put him in the freezer for safe-keeping. This, too, feels like a kind of prayer.
Mum wants you to go to Sunday school. You make a face. Geminis are fickle and the Aquarian influence makes you susceptible to rebellion.
When the powers that be first designed Adelaide, they argued over the exact location of the city in relation to its main harbour. Colonel William Light chose a site fourteen kilometres south-east of the port, and planned to run a canal between the two points. It would be the aorta of South Australian trade. However, the route was uphill, and the water refused to flow in the right direction.
In 2001 you decide to become a Goth. This is, in part, a response to your parents’ divorce, which is at once messy and completely silent. One day Dad is there and the next he’s not, banished to the other side of the world. It feels as though the scripture is beginning to reveal itself as nothing more than desperate scrawling. In part, it is because of Izzy.
Adelaide was designed with morality in mind. Good men, definitely white, definitely not convicts, would be sold tiny boxes of land and they would live sensible, straightforward lives with sensible, straightforward wives. The South Australian Colonisation Commissioners drew up plans and bickered about how best to strike lines in the dirt so that the men who walked them would be on the right side of virtue. Never mind what came before, as long as they could control what came after.
You buy a black dress with lace sleeves from the old Brickworks markets, borrow your sister’s battered Doc Martens, strap an upturned cross to your neck and smother your eyes with so much cheap eyeliner you immediately begin to cry. Which helps, because tear-stain
ed is just the kind of dramatic look you’re going for.
Izzy’s legs are hairy and she is so pale you swear you can see the messy knot of blood beneath her skin, thudding in time with your own heart. On days when you feel the teetering of the Earth and the pull of the Moon too strongly, she strokes your back and lets you wear her favourite cat necklace.
Your sister warns you about how obsessive lesbians can be, and you burn with silence in the back of the car. The lights of the western suburbs flash past the window, blinking in code.
The streets of Adelaide are lined with steel-wrapped concrete poles that commune with the edges of the sky. They were designed by James Cyril Stobie from the Adelaide Electric Supply Company when the city was faced with a dwindling timber supply that twisted and crumbled between the teeth of termites. Now, primary schools are given licence to mural their local poles, and some neighbourly folk coat the ones outside their houses with chalkboard paint, inviting passers-by to see the resplendent contents of their minds and the occasional drawing of a penis. These indestructible alien forms were not part of the plan for the city, yet there they now stand, sacred towers adorned with art and dicks.
Izzy holds your hand when you go to see Bridget Jones’s Diary and afterwards, over pancakes, she asks you to be her girlfriend via a tiny note, haphazardly torn from her maths exercise book. You turn the piece of paper over and write yes, push the paper back into her hand. She is an Aquarius, her birthday two days before Valentine’s Day. She jokes that she was born already resisting heteronormative romance narratives. This makes you exceptionally compatible. She is eight hundred and fifty-two days older and three centimetres taller than you. The taste of her lips cannot be quantified, but you learn that it can be drawn out, made to linger in the chasm of your mouth.
The school calls your mum and tells her about your inappropriate relationship with another female student.
For all its plans and well-drawn lines of rectitude, Adelaide’s main exports are AFL players and wine. It also leads the country in number of sex shops per capita. The idea was a forgetful utopia, so drunk on middle-class propriety that it could ignore its violent beginnings. The reality is something else.
After you swallow handfuls of pills, Izzy comes to visit you in the hospital, climbs into the bed next to you and puts her head on your shoulder. She brings food too, eager to keep you safe from hospital meals. You can barely eat, having turned yourself inside out in search of God’s plan. She is kind, but her kisses feel like rough penance.
At home, Mum comes into your room and tells you the stories of the babies she lost before you arrived. She outlines the plan she had for each of them, for you: a husband (white, of course), a baby, a house in a suburb just like this one. She gently tucks your hair behind your ear. Sometimes, she says, the best part happens after you lose faith in the design.
Sometimes the planets dance, the rivers run the wrong way and the timber curls. Sometimes, you turn out gay.
LGBTI-Q&A:
William Yang
Australia’s leading social photographer
Benjamin Law: Tell me about where you were born and grew up.
William Yang: I was born in 1943, in Mareeba in north Queensland, and I grew up in the town of Dimbulah, where my father had a tobacco farm.
Before we talk about you being gay, tell me more about ‘discovering’ you were Chinese.
When I was about six years old, one of the kids at school called me ‘Ching Chong Chinaman, born in a jar, christened in a teapot, ha ha ha’. I had no idea what he was talking about. But I knew he was being horrible to me. So I went home to my mother and said to her, ‘Mum, I’m not Chinese, am I?’ And my mother looked at me very sternly and she said, ‘Yes. You. Are.’ Her tone was hard and it shocked me. And I knew in that moment that being Chinese was like some terrible curse, and I could not rely on my mother for help. Or my brother, who was four years older than me, very much more experienced in the world. He chimed in: ‘And you’d better get used to it.’
Was it similarly confronting discovering your sexuality?
Well, I knew from a very early age that I was attracted to men, although because I was so young, I didn’t really realise it was sexual. We had workers on the farm, and I was always attracted to the good-looking ones.
You’re really painting a scene there. Handsome farm workers picking tobacco. Very cinematic.
It could be a fantasy, yes.
Do you still remember your first crush?
Yes, it was a person in high school. It was kind of painful in a way; it never went anywhere. Around that time, I was at high school in Cairns, maybe about sixteen. I was reading the afternoon newspaper, and I came across an article on homosexuality. It named three famous ones in history. The shock of recognition hit me like a thunderbolt. I thought, ‘Oh god, there’s a name for it.’
Was that reassuring or terrifying?
It wasn’t reassuring, but there was a certain recognition of self. But now I thought there were four homosexuals in the world: Oscar Wilde, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and me. It wasn’t until many years later that I came out, in Sydney, after university in Brisbane. I was swept out in the gay liberation movement in the early ’70s in Sydney.
Was it only after arriving in Sydney that you met another openly gay person?
No, no. When I was in Brisbane I was extremely friendly with another person. We kind of knew that each other was gay, although it was never physical. There was a friendship.
Was it a friendship where you were able to have frank conversations about your sexuality?
No, no, no. That was never mentioned. Or it was hinted at, rather than never mentioned. He’d tell me . . . he’d sometimes go down to Sydney and have a wild, debauched weekend. I was very unconfident, but as it was, I took his photograph. That was the substitute for having sex: taking his photograph. With the camera between us, I felt I had certain liberties. I could say ‘take off your shirt’ or ‘lie on the bed’ and these commands didn’t seem as threatening as they would have without the camera between us. So that was how I kind of got my substitute. I found that intensely exciting: taking photographs of handsome men. It was a ritual very much like having sex with a person, only we didn’t have sex, we acted out – or at least I was acting out – a kind of fantasy.
Do you have a coming-out story, per se?
When I came to Sydney, this friend of mine was living in a gay situation, with drag queens. They all just assumed I was gay, so I didn’t really have to come out. So that was easy, although only those people recognised I was gay. But during gay liberation in the early ’70s in Sydney, there were more and more people coming out as being gay. We, the early gay people, really had a lot of trouble recognising other gay people. There were always conversations: ‘Is he gay or isn’t he?’ And, ‘Should I put the hard word on him?’ Those kinds of situations. One of the things that developed in gay culture in those early days was a dress code: moustaches, butch clothing, like construction workers.
What about now? What are the things central to gay culture nowadays that you couldn’t have anticipated when you were growing up gay?
There’s been an evolution in how to find people. You can be very specific on Grindr, and find people who have specific tastes. I’m fairly old in terms of the gay – what would you say? – scale of desirability. Yet there are people who like older men.
Expand on that for me. What do you mean low on the ‘scale of desirability’?
Well, most people don’t like older gay people. There’s age discrimination. You become less desirable. But there are people who like older men. You would never find this out at a bar, but you can with the internet. It’s just a more sophisticated way of hooking up with people.
How do you feel about where we are politically and socially with our attitudes towards the queer community? What do you think of the progress that’s been made in your lifetime?
Oh, a huge amount of progress has been made. In fact, the history of the gay community
in Australia shows that there can be social change within forty years, or fifty years. From the attitudes I grew up with in Queensland – totally suppressive – to attitudes now where the majority of people approve of gay people and give them permission to marry, that’s a huge change. Even I feel emboldened by that. I feel more confident in telling the gay story of my life.
Say you could go back in time and speak to the young version of William Yang: the teenage version of you crushing on boys; the twenty-something version of you in Sydney. What advice would you give them?
Well, there was one thing: I always thought I was extremely unattractive. I would tell my younger self that I had something that I didn’t realise that I had: I had youth. I was young. That’s something you never realise until you’ve lost it. So I’d say to my younger self to be more confident. I didn’t feel confident about the way I looked, and that’s a racial thing. There’s still lots of people who say, ‘No Asians.’ But Asians have got a much higher profile now in Australia than they had in the ’70s.
And what advice would you have for people growing up queer today?
You’re okay. You have a right to be on this earth as much as any other person. There are a lot of people still that tell you that your sexuality is wrong, or sick. That isn’t true. You’re valid as a human. You’ve just got every right to be here as the next person.