Growing Up Queer in Australia

by Benjamin Law

  To some gay people, being bi seems easy. We have the supposed luxury of being chameleons, the freedom to sit on both sides of the fence, the privilege of choosing from the entire buffet rather than being confined to a corner table, as if sex were simply a smorgasbord and falling in love a matter of calculated odds. Perhaps when you look at it from that point of view, the surprisingly sharp economic disadvantages of bisexual identification look less like structural disadvantage and more like privileged whining (one Californian study found that while gay men and lesbians earned 2 to 3 per cent less than straight men, bisexual women earned 11 per cent less and bisexual men ten to 15 per cent less).

  The truth is, being bisexual means being invisible, especially if you are in a monogamous relationship, whether you paint yourself like a rainbow or a white picket fence. This is something I still struggle with in my thirties, though there is marginally less social presumption in some circles now; at the age of twenty, it seemed like a no-win situation. As a young bisexual woman I was presumed to be performing for an audience (of men) – ‘bi for the guys’ – experimenting, or else excluded from the conversation altogether. I found this alienating and difficult. To the queer community, I wasn’t serious enough, but in the hetero world I was just fodder for pornography. There was, it appeared, no room for those who quietly straddled categories or defied them altogether. So I washed my hands of it and hung around instead with the freaks and geeks, Goths and punks and pixies and nerds, because with them I felt more often than not that my sexuality was just another dimension of me: not a flag I had to fly, or an aberration I had to justify, or something I had to think about all the time. We called ourselves ‘alternative’ – a word all the more appropriate in retrospect. We were not the opposite of the mainstream, but simply ‘other’. We were all a bit NQR in our own way, and there was a kind of solidarity in that.

  When my friendship with Jill turned sexual, I was in the process of ending three years with a guy I’ll call Paul. It had begun as a long-term affair under the nose of his girlfriend. After a six-month break, which I spent in Europe, it developed into apparent exclusivity. We knew all the same people, went to the same parties, listened to the same bands. It had all the appearance of conventionality, but that façade belied the rottenness at its core.

  Romance is a narrative of power. The ‘falling’ part of ‘falling in love’ gives only the barest clue to the absolute abandonment of sense, control and responsibility that characterises these experiences. Falling in love with Paul meant that what I wanted (him, his attention, his affection) subsumed my own needs (agency, independence, self-determination) so completely that I allowed a relationship to develop with the power differential skewed entirely in his favour. The result was passive-aggressiveness and manipulation on his part, near total emotional dependence on mine. A balloon of insecurity billowed up around me, expanding and contracting on his whim, distorting every experience and feeling, and I did not know how I would ever escape it.

  I eventually escaped it because other women punctured it. First there was Cara: an affair at a party he had refused to attend – rain, oranges, cold air and warm breath, rushes of heat; and something solidified inside me, a kernel, a core that was mine and mine alone. Then there was Dana, a covert fix up by a gay friend – a drunken night on the town, an airbed in a spare room on the other side of the city, a mortifying 6 am taxi-ride home – and I stepped across some invisible threshold.

  And then there was Jill.

  *

  I was not prepared for the amount of attention our relationship would attract. If I had expected anything, I suppose it was that having a girlfriend would be much the same as having a boyfriend, only that men would understand you were neither available nor interested (they would assume you were a lesbian – bi-erasure at work) and that they would accept that, even if they didn’t exactly respect it. On the contrary, the objectification became worse.

  Much of the attention was lascivious: men expressed leering disappointment at ‘another hot chick off the market, such a shame’ (the egotistic presumptions underpinning such a statement astonish me still). Propositions were made to us as a couple by friends and strangers alike, with no encouragement on our part. (Why do they assume our relationship is less serious than theirs? I used to wonder.) Some of it was just plain nasty, like the man at the bar who came up to me while Jill was in the bathroom and said, ‘Do me a favour, don’t order the ox tongue’ (it took me a few minutes to register that he wasn’t talking about the bar menu). To some, it seemed like our relationship made us cooler; to others, it simply made us objects of scrutiny.

  At the same time, I was buried in books about gender and narrative, sexual politics and the politics of love as part of my studies. I viewed my relationship with Paul, retrospectively, through the prism of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: ‘Every woman in love recognises herself in Hans Andersen’s little mermaid who exchanged her fishtail for feminine legs through love and then found herself walking on needles and live coals.’ I began to understand romance as a narrative of male power and female obliteration. I found solidarity with women writers in a way I never had before, and those books were helping me to politicise my own identity as a woman. Simultaneously, I began to reject the idea of essential maleness or femaleness; we were gendered and oppressed not by our intrinsic nature, but by society and culture. I found this galvanising, but my actual experience of it was contradictory: I saw the expectations that came from gender categories as damaging and destructive, yet I still invested a lot in marking myself as feminine in many ways; although my relationship with Jill was founded on a mutual desire for intimacy, not politics, I couldn’t help but begin to see the politics of it, too.

  Jill didn’t share my feminist political compulsion, although she listened and nodded along when I talked about it. The work I was doing might have been academic but it was also intensely personal, and the deeper I went into it, the more imperative it felt to interrogate all the disparate pieces of myself on political terms. What role was this relationship playing in my life? How had the past informed my sense of identity? What collateral damage had I sustained? And how, crucially, could I fix it?

  None of these questions helped with the fact that despite being in a relationship with a woman, the roles prescribed for lesbians felt uncomfortable to me, like I was wearing clothes that were slightly too small. I started to understand why other queer folk became so strident about performing their sexuality in a particular way, why they embraced the structure and certainty provided by the stereotype, even as they were restricted by it. Because I felt like I was failing somehow. I knew what I wanted, but I didn’t know how to perform it. I didn’t know how to perform myself. I felt like I was learning how to fuck all over again. I felt clumsy in my body, like a fifteen-year-old virgin, uncomfortable with my own experiences, and unsure of what progress meant in a relationship that felt so unthreatening. A lifetime of hetero conditioning had set me up for relationships based almost entirely on conflict, yet this was pleasant, comfortable, easy, nice. I didn’t know what to do. It was a completely unfamiliar power dynamic, and I didn’t know how to move within it.

  Perhaps by the time I finished my thesis, I’d given up trying. Perhaps I was too tired, too bruised, too emotionally drained to do anything but fall back, for a while anyway, into the at least familiar head-fuck of hetero sex. Perhaps I was just twenty-two and careless. Or perhaps Jill wasn’t getting much out of the relationship anymore either, and it was falling to pieces even before I stuffed it full of dynamite and lit a match.

  *

  When Jill emailed a couple of years later to explain that actually she felt more male than female, that he was a better pronoun to use, and he had chosen to change his name to Jack, it was unexpected, but not wholly surprising. We had been broken up for a few years by that point, and our friendship had slid back into its old sporadic patterns. Still, my relationship with the person I had known as Jill had been so important to me, so formative, precisely be
cause I had understood that person to be a woman. Jack was at once the same person and not the same, and the revelation created a dissonance between memory and knowledge that could up-end the way I had understood our relationship, even the way I understood myself.

  Many trans people do not want to be associated with the gender identity (mis)assigned to them at birth, and experience discussion of their past selves in those terms as an incredible source of anxiety, disrespectful, hurtful, wrong. I understand this. But when I think about what my relationship with past-Jack meant to me, when I consider how defining that relationship was for me precisely because it was gendered in a particular way, I know things are not so simple.

  If I’m honest, I started to come to terms with Jack’s transition properly only when I found a way in which to speak about the past. This came from Jack himself. In the early days at least, he referred to Jill directly, to her, in the past tense, as if she were another, separate, person. It was a linguistic device as much as anything, but what it enabled for me was something quite important: it lent legitimacy to my experience of the relationship with the person Jack had been, and allowed me to process the change – to speak about it as a temporal (as distinct from temporary) thing in the timeline of our friendship, even as I simultaneously knew that Jack had felt his body was somehow wrong for a long time, and experienced femaleness as an obstruction.

  So when I say that I had a relationship with a woman, when I talk about that person and call her Jill, I am not trying to deny Jack his transition, or suggesting that his true gender identity is anything but the one he articulates now. But neither can I retrospectively apply to our past relationship the knowledge I have about Jack’s identity now. What would that even mean? That he was lying to me by presenting as a woman throughout our relationship? That he should have known better? Identity doesn’t work like that, and society is hard enough on those who express gender diversity without adding that kind of personal blame to the mix. So when I talk about my relationship with Jill, more than anything it is a way of speaking that allows me to be honest with myself: to respect my own experience of our relationship and how significant it was for me, which hinged on who Jack was at the time – living as and presenting as female, while nevertheless in conflict with it.

  *

  A little while later, Jack and I met for coffee in the city. He had a new girlfriend, and he’d started lifting weights. We had only seen each other a couple of times since he began testosterone treatment, and I was still getting used to the changes in his appearance, and his voice. Jill’s speaking voice had had a melodic tone, although flattened and drawn by the shape of her accent. Jack’s voice was raspy and deep, and it took me by surprise the first few times I heard it. I was embarrassingly curious, but he smiled and reassured me that he was okay with my stumbling. It was pretty common, he said.

  I asked him how testosterone felt. He paused over his short black, squinted out the window across the street, as if fixated on the church opposite.

  ‘It’s like squares,’ he said finally. ‘It’s hard to explain. Like, for example, the other day my girlfriend sent me this text saying I should come over to her place. It was really kind of flowy and getting in the mood, you know? Like, Drop everything and come over right now because I want you kind of thing. I was really excited, so I wrote back, Okay, I just have to go home first and have a salad. And she was all like, Well, I’ve never been stood up for salad before! It was only then that I realised I’d totally missed the point. It seemed perfectly logical to me – I’m on this proper lifting diet, you see, and my brain was like, I have to do this work-out and then I have to have a salad and then I can go see my girlfriend. Squares.’ He made shapes with his hands, indicating the thought structure. ‘But I never used to think like that.’

  ‘Is it true that men have these conversations when women aren’t around that . . .’

  I didn’t even need to finish the sentence because Jack was shooting me a grave look and nodding firmly.

  ‘Dudes communicate differently, and I can see it now. I’m kind of part of that – I understand it in a way I never used to. But I’m not totally part of it either. Like, when they’re saying all that sexist stuff, I can’t just dive in and say, Hey, that’s not right. It’s not my place, you know? When there’s a group of women together it’s different too. The way conversations grow between women – it’s so familiar, and some part of me still wants to get up and go over and be a part of that conversation. But I can’t enter that space anymore – I can’t catch on to the rhythms and the flow in the way I used to.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Here was my friend, my ex-girlfriend no less, telling me that not only did testosterone change his body, it changed his mind: the very mechanisms by which he interpreted the world and constructed thoughts.

  ‘Being a man suits you,’ I said, suddenly. ‘I was going to say that you’re still the same person but you’re not. And yet . . .’

  I was lost for words. Jack believed in spirits and human essences, a separate soul that inhabited the body. In that respect, the body was a house for the person Jack was, and therefore the person I called ‘Jack’ was a constant, albeit changing, presence within that material form.

  But I didn’t believe in spirits. And it wasn’t until later that it struck me how much of a dilemma that was. If the body was all there was, and that body could change quite dramatically – hormone levels could be recalibrated, breasts removed, organs replaced with artificial parts – what did that mean for our understanding of what constituted a person? What, exactly, was it that I named when I spoke of myself? Or Jack, or my mother, or anyone? If I was no more or less than my body, did that make me more or less of a person depending on the kind of body I had, if parts of it were missing or fundamentally altered, whether by accident or through my own choices? And what about my thoughts and feelings? Brain chemistry changes all the time, with or without the intervention of drugs, so what is the identifiable constant in any one person?

  I remembered a philosopher once saying that the universe was a negotiable alliance of things. I couldn’t remember who the philosopher was, or where I heard them say it, but the proposition rang true: I am the aggregate of thousands of molecules, electrons that fire and fade, impulses and substances that process nutrients and expel waste, atoms that are absorbed and shed and replaced. Each one of us is the locus of a mass of material movement, a cluster of intricate physical relationships. This mass we identify as the body, the movement as thought and action: a collection of experiences that leaves marks and scars, interpreted and understood as narratives, as history; as a past, present and future. In Marxist theory, the word for it is dialectic: constant flow, constant change, development through movement and essential contradiction. I am simultaneously an individual and a system of processes: an identifiable thing, material in the world; and a cluster of perpetually moving, changing and developing entities.

  ‘You are a unique collection of experiences,’ I said finally to Jack that day. ‘You are memories and events and changes and processes, all bundled together. We used to call that Jill, but now we call it Jack.’

  To My Man of Seventeen Years

  Henry von Doussa

  Doctor Duncan in the river was before my time. The homosexual university lecturer tossed into the Torrens at a spot under a bridge where, allegedly, the Adelaide newspapers said, men met for sex. ‘Number One Beat’ I would later learn it was called. ‘Grab ‘em, give those poofters a swim. Give ‘em a dunking. Go . . .’ But me, in 1972, I knew nothing of such things. The attack was talked about by Mum and Dad while I skidded about the kitchen floor, learning to crawl; a toddler in a blue flannel growsuit, sopping up the mirthful language of small-town gossip and innuendo.

  Sopped up other conversations too as Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan played on the record-player in the kitchen, and later The Naked Vicar Show and Betty Blokk-buster playing on cassettes in the Datsun as Mum drove us to swimming lessons in the Adelaide Hills. Conversations my pare
nts didn’t shy away from: 1973, homosexuality declared not a mental illness; 1975, South Australia, the first Australian state to decriminalise gay sex. Me, I was turning four in 1975.

  The lecturer drowned. His companion made it to the riverbank and survived. Dad was a lawyer in a town constrained by churches while at the same time lurching forward under the direction of a state premier in pink shorts. Dad’s talk about the attack – alleged police involvement and the circus that followed – hung in the air around me. Did I hear him mock the premier? Was it the colour of his shorts or the colour of his labour politics? Did I hear that the lecturer was a bad influence on young students and not that much of a loss? ‘He had it coming. Those men, what a life.’ Did I hear Mum defend the dead man and admonish Dad for his views? Did I? Never early to bed, what did I hear as they smoked cigarettes and she poured him another drink while I kicked about on a rug by the fire? ‘Give the nipple another squeeze,’ he would say, referring to the plastic nozzle on the wine cask.

  How to illustrate the time that’s passed? In order or just the important bits? Is it chronology or relevance that should govern a story, govern a life? I may have to jump about as I illuminate what I need to show you: all that must be cordoned off in the pursuit of belonging, the discounted residue that must be pushed away to become as clear and seamless and functional as a sheet of glass, to become a normal person. ‘Fuck that shit,’ my friend tells me. ‘I’ve never been able to sustain a relationship, and I’ve given up trying. I don’t think I’ll ever feel love, you know, deep down, long-term, forever.’