Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  I recall his big hands on my bony shoulders.

  I recall the feeling of being shaken, the sensation of being pinned to the mattress. It only lasted a moment, but during moments of trauma, time becomes heavy; black matter.

  I recall him barking at me to return to my room.

  I recall his desperate anger, a ploy designed to hurt and shock me out of her bed.

  ‘Your mother likes it on the floor anyway.’

  That’s all I can recall.

  I can’t recall who won the battle that night: I don’t know if I returned to my own bed or managed to stay in hers. I suspect I gave in to his commands, and I have no memory of Mum coming home that night, so in all likelihood I fell asleep at the post. A failed attempt at being her little moral guardian. Regardless, there was no place for him in that bed, with or without me in it. Eventually, I won the war: the divorce was indeed final. He moved on and remarried, and in time so did my mother. They are both still with these partners, and are happy.

  That night was at the edge of many things, but more than the golf course or puberty or another divorce, the events of that evening kept me at the edge of ever feeling entirely safe around heterosexual men, from then until now.

  It is possible to despise and fear the thing you pity. It is possible to understand that what my stepfather said and did to me as a child came from a place of utter weakness. I see it now as a pathetic move by a desperate man, so wounded from being rejected by his wife that he struck out at a child, her child. I think I saw it that way then too, but growing up queer is questioning how you see the world – because we are repeatedly shown it is their world, not ours.

  We are expected to permit, forgive and make room for the behaviour of heterosexual, cisgendered Australian men. We are expected to understand that they aren’t to blame for how they are. We just rent space in the edges where they permit us to dwell, and when we try to stand up for ourselves, or others, we are just bony shoulders for them to shake.

  But as my little bony shoulders grew broader, I learnt the value of standing with – and up for – others. For women, like my mother and my sisters. For my queer siblings. For my HIV+ siblings. For those whose tribe I am not a part of and whose shoulders have borne much greater burdens than mine. That little boy on the edge of the golf course grew up to dedicate his life to fighting with those tribes.

  With every victory, every legislative win, every man who is shown he cannot get away with acting like his fathers and forefathers, our many bony shoulders knit into something stronger than all of them. And on those shoulders will one day stand younger queers, who will look upon that impotent, white, male, cis, heterosexual rage and do what I wish I could have done that night: laugh.

  Not Special

  Tim McGuire

  Before I was diagnosed with HIV, I thought that I probably would be. Not just on the day I went to the doctor for my test result, though I thought it then, too. Just before I left the house, I changed out of my favourite San Francisco Giants hoodie into a less special one, because I didn’t want the jumper to be associated with what I imagined would be a memory best repressed. I would want the hoodie later, I figured – something comforting to change into after my world was changed as well.

  I’m good with dates (the ones in the calendar, not the other kind), and I knew this one was auspicious already. It was 22 September: the first time I went overseas, my sister’s first book launch, the day Oceanic Flight 815 crash-landed on Lost.

  No, I suspected it much earlier. In high school, I read Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave, Australia’s best-known gay love story and AIDS tragedy, which charts Tim’s struggle with the disease until his death in 1995, shortly before the memoir was published. I bought the book in secret after my high school cancelled our Year 12 drama excursion to see Holding the Man on stage. I was indignant but unsurprised; this was the same all-boys college whose entire sex education curriculum across the eight years of my schooling there comprised a single lesson taught to just one of four Year 7 classes, chosen seemingly at random, and involving only a VHS screening on the reproductive behaviour of dingoes. I never saw it, but the plot was retold on the handball courts in reverential whispers, and it was evidently powerful enough to trigger the onset of puberty in all thirty boys by the rolling of the end credits – just in time for our Year 7 camp. Strange for a Catholic college, I’ve realised since, to choose, of all the sexual positions to introduce us to, doggy style. That said, nobody in my graduating class got anyone pregnant.

  And so I learnt more about sex, its mechanics and its consequences from Timothy Conigrave than I did in a classroom. I wept while I read his book, afraid for myself and grieving for this man I didn’t know and with whom I shared a name.

  After high school, I continued to learn about sex – often when I had the house to myself, a strong wi-fi connection and a spare twelve minutes – from the internet, and in doing so discovered a gay porn studio that primarily produces movies in which the actors have sex without condoms. The relatively notorious studio – sex without condoms, or barebacking, is a divisive topic in the gay community – is called Treasure Island Media, or TIM. The same acronym was later adopted by the Australian grassroots collective for people living with HIV, The Institute of Many – also TIM. It’s not that I’m particularly superstitious (my boyhood careers as a Charmed One and a Vampire Slayer notwithstanding), but I took these coincidences as portends, evidence even, that I would someday contract HIV.

  Tim, the universe seemed to be saying. Tim, Tim, Tim.

  Even after I was diagnosed, the coincidences continued. The clinical trial through which I currently receive my lifesaving antiretroviral medication is called the GEMINI study. Can you guess what my zodiac sign is? It’s not Virgo the Virgin.

  *

  A year before I read Holding the Man, I fractured my left wrist for the third time. This latest fracture was my brother’s doing. Nan’s birthday party, a backyard scuffle. After the celebrations were cut short (sorry, Nan), I was fitted with a cast that my mates at school jostled to sign. On it, near my thumb-now-claw, my friend Carleigh wrote, ‘AIDS. LOL.’

  The joke worked, I guess, because AIDS felt very far away – geographically and historically – from Brisbane’s South Bank cinema, outside which Carleigh wrote her double acronym in the practised penmanship of a Year 11 student during exam block. There was something fantastical about AIDS; it was a disease that happened to other people in other places or times, like The Plague or scurvy. In developed countries, the AIDS crisis reached its peak before we were born. It was 2007 now, we were sixteen, and the worst tragedy we’d known was a thrice-fractured wrist.

  Still, I didn’t laugh. I don’t think I laughed at HIV/AIDS jokes until after I was diagnosed, when it seemed suddenly necessary to find humour in them, to wrest back control of what was happening to me. Though it made me anxious for reasons I couldn’t yet properly articulate, I thanked Carleigh for her contribution to my cast; it would have been rude not to, given she was my fourth-top friend on Myspace at the time. As the weeks went by, my cast got grimier, the well wishes and the biro band names rubbed away, but the AIDS message endured, imperishable, written in a black marker whose ink was permanent.

  *

  I asked my secret top friend, Rosie – secret because she didn’t have Myspace, and so there was no public way to rank her – to come with me to my first sexual health test, at the Metro North Sexual Health and HIV Service on Roma Street. We were in our first year of university, and I had been sexually active for a while. All the way back in Year 2, my parents received concerned phone calls from my teachers after I was discovered leading girls behind an old demountable building to make them kiss me. Word got around. Mum’s friends started calling me ‘Casanova’; Dad’s friends, ‘The Chick Magnet’. None of them was concerned. What did trouble my parents was my friendship with these girls, not my ability to lure them into witnessless spaces to touch them against their wishes. Too many female friends, they thought, and I
’d end up a sissy. They sent me to my all-boys college at the earliest opportunity, Year 5, but my libido continued to run high in a school full of guys, one of whom I eventually started having terrible, muted sex with. Terrible because we were both racked with guilt, muted because we were doing it in the school toilets, next to the classroom where he’d witnessed the dingo documentary years earlier. It was actually him who prompted me to get tested at the clinic for the first time.

  I was tested for everything, not just HIV. In the examination room, I lay on my side, knees hugged to my chest as instructed, the white hillock of my bottom exposed to the nurse’s gloved finger, which he inserted into me with as much notice as you would provide a pot plant before dipping your finger into its soil to check for moisture. I stared at the wall, memorising the building’s evacuation route from a poster there. Afterwards, he tickled the back of my throat with a swab and I gagged dramatically.

  Giving blood makes me feel faint and so, after I failed to stand properly upright, a different nurse had to fetch a biscuit jar from the clinic tearoom. There was one biscuit left, an Orange Slice, the worst of the Arnott’s Assorted Creams, but I munched it gratefully, wondering whether it was left over from an assorted pack or not, and feeling a flare of sympathy for the clinic staff if it wasn’t.

  The clinic rang with my results a week later. Negative. But, even still, my fear marched on, as thrumming and resilient as a pride parade. I got tested for HIV many times after that, even when I had no reason to, and though I always tested negative until I didn’t, I only ever felt like I’d dodged a positive result for now, not forever.

  *

  Because I was afraid of HIV, I saw it everywhere, and engaged with it nowhere. Every day seemed to be World AIDS Day. Under a pink sky breaking across the morning, and wearing last night’s clothes, I walked from the house of a stranger to a cab rank in Fortitude Valley, up Ann Street, where giant red ribbons hung like Christmas bunting.

  I avoided films about HIV, articles, books and news reports. In doing so, I learnt nothing about it, and in my ignorance I became complicit in its stigma. To my friends, I pretended to have seen Dallas Buyers Club and the screen adaptation of Holding the Man, because they were in the gay canon. A canon, I realised later, that had impressed on me, as if by osmosis, the idea that I would likely become HIV positive, or that my life would be tragic in some way. Not because my name was Tim, but because I was gay.

  Fear, though, can be a terrific motivator. I wish that mine had been sufficient, or that education had been enough to keep me from making an error of judgement, a quick misplacement of faith, that I will regret, probably, forever.

  *

  The best thing about being diagnosed with HIV is that you never have to take another HIV test. When I was twenty-five, an anxiety I’d harboured since I was sixteen was finally realised, and then it was done. I was HIV-positive now, and the world, though it felt perilous at times, didn’t stop spinning.

  Because I am lucky. I am so miraculously, circumstantially fortunate to have been diagnosed with HIV in 2016, in Australia. HIV has always been a lifelong illness but, until recently, its prognosis has never been long life. Forty years ago, the world didn’t know HIV. It was a disease without a name, much less a treatment plan, but still it was coming, a gathering storm on the horizon. Now, HIV is permanent but treatable, serious but survivable. And because I live in Australia, I have free access to the medication that enables it to be so. Other people living with HIV are not so lucky.

  So, now what?

  *

  A few hours after I was diagnosed, I watched the season one finale of Stranger Things with my sister, who had attended the doctor’s appointment with me. At the end of the episode, one of the boys vomits up a little alien slug into the bathroom sink and stares, horrified, as it slithers away. I scrunched up my face in distaste, and my sister turned to look at me and said, ‘And you think you’ve got problems.’

  She was right; I didn’t really. I started thinking a lot about amputees who go on to run marathons and win gold medals at the Olympics, blind people who become celebrated musical or even visual artists. Cancer patients who tick off bucket-list dreams in an impossible time frame. We love these stories because they inspire us, they remind us that life’s challenges are in fact surmountable. Look what they did, we think, and they did it with one leg. It’s the kind of tale of human perseverance we make movies about, the kind of triumph over adversity that might also win you a book deal. As a writer, and an opportunist, it did make me wonder: How do people living with HIV get in on that? What equivalent, aspirational, against-all-odds goal should we be setting ourselves? To have sex with as many people as possible? I’d been working towards that goal, with varying degrees of success, since I was teenager. I needed something new, something special.

  ‘You’re not special,’ my sister reminded me, ‘just because you have HIV. It’s an epidemic.’

  She’s right. I’m not special. Just lucky.

  Jack and Jill and Me

  Stephanie Convery

  I am not outside the language that structures me, but neither am I determined by the language that makes this ‘I’ possible.

  Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

  I met Jack when I was in high school. Only he wasn’t Jack then, he was Jill.

  Jill had a tattoo on the nape of her neck, dyed black hair and a face full of piercings. She had a bright barking laugh that cut through the tension in any room. She wore low-slung jeans and boots, played the saxophone and studied visual art and design. We were introduced by a mutual friend who dragged four of us to Melbourne’s Alexandra Gardens one lush spring day because he wanted us to start a band.

  The band never eventuated, but a network of friendships did. Jill lived on the opposite side of the city – my first proper friend from the west side. We caught up on and off over the next few years, mostly chatting online, but occasionally trekking over to each other’s neighbourhood. She drove a restored but temperamental Ford Fairlane; I caught endless trains and buses. Sometimes we’d convince a mutual friend to drive to each other’s parties. When I moved away from the sharp, dry heat of Australia to spend months in a midwinter depression in the snow-swept mountains of Eastern Europe, she wrote me letters filled with the intimate trivialities of her day-to-day life: something about cheese; fixing her car; a copy of her receipt from the milk bar; an instruction to listen to ‘Doughnut Song’ by Tori Amos because it would make me feel better about the things I’d left behind. I listened to it one snowstorm-dark morning, watching tiny snowflakes spiral softly onto the windowsill, thinking it was possibly perfect.

  Ours was a friendship that would flare into life unexpectedly and fall dormant just as quickly, and it continued in its uneven way after my return from Europe and throughout my undergraduate degree. Then, late one October, a dozen of us took a weekend trip to the country. We drank, listened to music and drove too fast along the highway. Friday night lasted until Saturday morning. Hangovers abounded. We piled plates with eggs and bacon, and washed it down with mugs of coffee. As the evening closed in, beer cans cracked open again; fuzzy-headed, raucous conversations on the porch dissolved into relaxed murmurs when a joint was passed around, and somewhere along the way, Jill and I sank into cushions on the floor of the living room, curled up together under a sleeping bag, talking, touching, sleeping.

  Our romance quickly became formal. I started my honours year and moved into a flat so close to hers we practically lived together. We shared a car, house keys, kitchen utensils, clothes, our bodies, and a friendship that had given way to something much deeper. For almost a year we existed like this, until I finished my degree and, in a reckless, cathartic moment post thesis submission, got drunk in the city with an old friend and ended up in bed with him. I owned up to it the following day, but it fractured the fragile ecosystem we’d created.

  The relationship disintegrated rapidly after that; a cold and sullen silence sat between us. I moved out. We both moved on. With pati
ence, we managed to salvage the acquaintance, and then, after a while, our friendship. It wasn’t long until the person I had known began to change in ways that were far more significant.

  *

  I resented the idea of coming out. It wasn’t that I was introverted, or that I felt like my romances were shameful (I talked blithely about the intimate details of my affairs whenever the fancy took me, possibly to my detriment), but that I loathed the idea of being pigeonholed. The social narratives around homosexuality had always left me with the impression that coming out was more than a courtesy. It was an expectation: like taking a ticket to join a queue or picking up litter; it was the responsibility of every good citizen to keep things neat and tidy.

  Not only that, the idea that my relationships or my identity required formal sanction by others frustrated me. Even in my hetero relationships, that sense of obligation weighed on me: was he my ‘boyfriend’? Was it serious or not? I never knew how to answer those questions in a way that felt honest or comfortable. How long did you need to be fucking before you became ‘more than’ friends? How was this the business of anyone and everyone with whom I had little more than a passing acquaintance? The whole interrogation seemed grounded in ideas about property, women, marriage and family that I believed had no right to dictate my life.

  But I had also never thought of myself as gay. I had identified as bisexual since my late teens, but only because it was the least-categorical category I knew. At the time, I’d never heard of queer – the term I would more likely use now – or pansexual, or any of the other words people use to characterise a non-exclusive, non-traditional sexuality. I just knew that I was attracted to women as much as I was to men, but that being into men made my interest in my own gender a lot easier to hide, even if I found it hard to ignore. But being bi had its drawbacks, too.

  When I was growing up, there was a lot of smack talk about bisexuality, both from within the queer community and without: about how bisexual people are just being greedy, how they don’t really know what they want, how they should ‘pick a side’. Like most discrimination, its roots are both cultural and political; some recent contributions have been the conflation of sexual politics with sexual identity that characterised the lesbian feminist movements of the ’80s, or the misplaced blame on bisexual men for the HIV/AIDS crisis.